TAKEN TO THE CLEANERS

I read Derek Picot’s piece entitled “Taken to the cleaners” (in the Jan/Feb edition) and was utterly appalled.

While he rightly acknowledges that most guests will have no idea what the appropriate price for laundering specific items might be, the idea that “the way forward is to understand the real cost of providing a laundry service, minimise it and then add as much profit as you can possibly get away with” is fundamentally misguided.

It’s precisely this kind of thinking that has led to the financial services industry being subject to “conduct” regulation. Part of what conduct regulators are looking at (in addition to other bad behaviour) is that firms don’t take advantage of their customers – notably by exploiting information asymmetry between what they know and what their clients know.

Given that many of the clients staying in the hotels Mr Picot’s piece is directed towards will work in the financial industry, can I politely suggest that subjecting them to the very thing their own regulators dislike is not very clever?

It’s also a bad business model irrespective of your client base. It might work in the short term – and there is an absence of conduct regulators in the travel industry – but it’s indicative of a “rip-off ” approach to customer service that will eventually get found out. Fleecing people because you can is not intelligent business in the 21st century.

Based on the article, the only reservation I intend to have with the sort of hotel taking advice from Mr Picot is around making a booking in the first place. Christian Hunt, UK