Behind the spotless fantasy of hotel holidays
THE pine trees and cool air of Baguio during Christmas a few years ago were the perfect setting for an exclusive outdoor concert by Gary Valenciano at the Baguio Country Club a few years ago. After a 30-man chorus and the legendary musician traveled from the lowland metropolis to the city in the mountains, it began to rain — hard. But the show must go on, and so should hotel operations. As the performers took to the damp stage, and guests huddled in tents, the country club’s housekeepers and room attendants wrestled with the weather. They ensured there was sufficient cover, that there were no holes in the roofs, that no heads got wet, and no guests got sick. Calm, composed, oblivious to the storm, and with nary a hair out of place, the staff ensured that the place remained dreamy. And indeed, it was.
While chefs have gone on to become the incontestable heroes of the hotel and restaurant industry, hospitality staff remain the knights who guard the hotel. Nameless, neat, courteous, and camouflaging, they keep the hotel alive. Hotels are, as André NaffisSahely wrote in The Paris Review, “interlinked with the desire to flee one’s bourgeois home.” The escape demands the creation of an impeccable, opulent, nearly perfect otherworld where a guest is the master, albeit transitory.
But a modern problem is challenging this centuries- old operation. As the real world increasingly becomes borderless, the employees, who create this fantasy, are also flying out.
“Most of the students, if they graduate tourism or hotel and restaurant management, at best they’ll stay in your establishment for two years,” said Anthony de Leon, who has been at the helm of Baguio Country Club for 27 years. “After that, they’ll work abroad. So the turnover is very high.”
The exodus isn’t only causing hotels to lose people, it is also causing them to lose money. Ramon Cabrera, general manager of The Manor at Camp John Hay, said the pressure to maintain 177 luxury rooms led the hotel to pay employees “more than the usual” in the industry — about 10 to 15% higher than the other hotels — “just to encourage them to stay.” On top of that, “I’m spending at least close to a million a year for training — I believe that’s the only way people learn to adapt to the standards we want,” Mr. Cabrera added. “I even get outside consultants. And to get outside consultants to do a series of lectures is not cheap.”
What makes expert fees so expensive? Why aren’t hoteliers settling for less? What makes trained hotel staff so precious that they are worth millions?
There is only one answer: Exacting standards.
Every year, the Hotel and Restaurant Association of Baguio, which Mr. De Leon founded 13 years ago, holds a Hotel and Restaurant Tourism ( HRT) Week, where students can compete in different categories, from popular “chef wars” to the more obscure bed-making category.
Succession planning, covering the demands of employment, as well as raising the standard are top considerations. This year, HRT Week was held in October, right before the peak holiday season.
And in this gathering, these standards are not whispered — they are celebrated.
BANQUETS FIT FOR ROYALTY
Enter Mari de Terry, who coowns fine dining restaurant Terry’s, and was one of the judges for the table setting category.
“They put a Maria Clara theme,” she pointed at an entry which went as far as using an abaniko ( hand fan) as a menu card. “But in the menu, they put a brioche,” she scoffed. The French pastry, to her, had no place in the Filipino spread. “Yes, it’s good to be creative, but you still have to follow the rules.
“This one, for example,” she said, turning her attention to a table of hardwood with no tablecloth, but with a complete set of wine glasses and sophisticated cutlery. “It’s supposed to be fine dining but it’s not,” she complained. “It does not have a mantel (tablecloth). There’s nothing wrong with setting it up on a table like this, but then you have to use plates and cutlery that will make the entire thing look more rustic.”
The rules aren’t as rigid, though: no more using tape measures or rulers to make sure that the plates and cutlery are in just the right place as royal banquets in Europe usually demand. But while it need not be necessarily stiff, she emphasized the importance of arranging all the elements. “There has to be a sequence where it’s but natural that you take a glass from the right.”
Even the menu cards did not escape her trained eye. “You cannot call a wine a wine if it’s not made of grapes,” she said, holding up a bottle of liquid made from bignay, a small edible fruit from a local tree. Unfortunately for the contenders who wrote “Bignay wine” on their menu, this judge grew up in Europe and is thus literate in eau- de-vie. “Kirsch,” she suggested, might be a more apt term than “wine.”
But being knowledgeable has a deeper purpose. “I was asking them, ‘Can you please explain to me? Can you tell me what is this made of?’” she narrated. “They were more focused on their table settings and they memorized what they’re supposed to say.
“But it’s not only that when you’re serving food,” she said. “It’s gotta be something that is whole. It’s not just the table setting, but the pairing of the wine and the food.”
The job of hotel staff isn’t only to set things on the table. “You see with your eyes,” she said. Judgment is not bought. “Visual harmony is very, very important,” she concluded.
BREATHING LIFE INTO EMPTY SPACES
For Romeo Chua, floral designer and events stylists who does consulting work for top hotels, while the aesthetic is very important, the materials should be handled with care.
“There’s a big difference between a floral arranger and a floral designer,” this judge said. “A floral arranger receives an order for a dozen roses and serves a dozen roses. Meanwhile, a floral designer, even if there are minimal flowers, can make use of foliage and other materials to make a masterpiece where every element has meaning.” It was a more comprehensive definition of what can be summarized in five words: Floral design is an art.
He explained that he based his own criteria for judging on the principles upheld by the World Flower
Council, an international organization of over a thousand members, of which he is a member. One of these standards is proportion. “If you have a ballroom,” he said as an example, “you can’t have flowers that are short. Your centerpieces will be overwhelmed by the venue. In an area, you have to know how big your arrangement will be to cover up the negative space.”
But the freedom to go big isn’t without responsibility. Critiquing during the competition, he focused on a sharp pole that stuck out of a piece. “What would happen to a guest in a long gown if she were to approach your work?” he pointed out.
And what makes a “floral design” more intricate and more expensive than a mere floral arrangement? “Make the client go near to appreciate what you made. How do you do that? You have to make a stunning focal point to entice the client,” he said.
“And when the client comes nearer, there must be something to discover,” he added. Trying to reach this level is worth it: “People are paying for your design.”
Cost, after all, is a big consideration for hiring services for hotel events. This is also, perhaps, the reason why another type of craft, ice carving, has been losing out.
Among local hoteliers, ice carving is arguably considered a “dying art.” In fact in Baguio, only two hotels still offer ice sculptures: Baguio Country Club and The Manor.
Since the peak of its popularity through the 1980s and ’ 90s, ice carving has been eclipsed by newer, less expensive decorative trends for events, and the craftsmen have since changed careers within the industry — putting down the ice pick and entering the cold kitchen as a cook.
Jean- Pierre Migné, an executive chef, was a witness to the heyday of ice sculpture. After spending years in the kitchens of the brightest restaurants in France and China, Mr. Migné tried his luck in the Philippines as the executive chef of the Hotel Nikko Manila Garden (today’s Dusit Thani Manila). That would be the breeding ground for the ice sculptors he’d accompany to compete in Japan. He was supposed to judge the ice sculpting event during the HRT Week this year, though contestants were hard to come by. As luck would have it, the event had to be canceled because of the onslaught of supertyphoon Lawin.
“The Philippines is home to worldclass carvers because many of them come from Paete, Laguna, a province known for wood carving,” he said. Today, Mr. Migné is watching ice sculpting’s seemingly impending demise.
Top hoteliers here insist on putting ice sculpting back on the map, but another problem arises: the carvers, few as they are, aren’t as good anymore. The lack of competition isn’t helping — from the 40 to 50 carvers Mr. Migné handled in the 1990s, today he can only encounter about seven at a time. Naturally, “they won’t exert much effort to make their work better,” he said.
But he is not losing hope: “I don’t want to consider it [a] dying [art]. It just needs one person to add a sparkle into it.” He fondly calls the ambition “Ice Carving 2016.”
“Think laser lights. Crazy ideas which can enhance the ice carving business to make it more interesting,” he mused.
FROM FANTASY TO REALITY
While ice sculptures and floral designs are more conspicuous, Glen Flores of Baguio’s first boutique hotel, Hotel Cosmopolitan, insists that modernizing should extend to even the most intimate corners of the establishment: the bedroom.
“As a hotelier, we try to give the best in everything, and one of the things guests look for is the cleanliness of the bed. The tidiness and how spicand-span,” said Mr. Flores, who was a judge at the bed-making competition.
In one’s home, making a bed could seem like a very trivial thing. Rearrange the pillows. Fold up the blanket.
But in a hotel, “there are a lot of people, they’re very meticulous,” Mr. Flores said.
“Everybody wants to see a bed that is fresh, that feels brand new, especially because they lay down there,” he added. A bed is a very intimate space, perhaps the most intimate in a hotel. Thus, it demands to be the most welcoming.
“As hoteliers, we want guests to be delighted when they enter their rooms,” he said. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder. “That’s why our judges have different opinions. Some do not like too many things on the bed because when the guest enters the room, they don’t want to take too many clutter out of the bed. Other judges, however, said that it’s okay, because when the guest enters they want to be impressed. It varies,” he said.
As for a consensus: “For majority of hoteliers, they want it to be kept to a minimum but they want a wow factor,” he said. The best design, he said, was where the team had a supervisor that saw that the bed design had a flow. “She was aligning everything,” he said about the coach. “I gave them high marks because I saw that everything was symmetrical.
“On my part,” he added, the ubiquitous “kissing swan” of folded towels is “no more.” He explained: “That is like... passé. But the others, they still find that nice.”
But while beauty takes time, the hotel industry still observes a unique timeline in which days start at 2 p. m. and ends at noon the following day.
“Speed [ is important] in a sense that during the peak seasons, where hotels have back-to-back bookings in which the guests will check out by 12 noon and in a few minutes, the rooms should be clean and seem like they’re brand new,” Mr. Flores said.
Within the walls of hotels, guests gain a new identity. Roaming around the lobby, hopping into elevators, they become masters whose every request is granted.
“The guest should feel like he’s the first person to ever enter the room,” Mr. Flores said. “It should always make an impression.” Such a romance is created by the hotel’s staff who manage every crease, every dirty towel, every missing bulb in a chandelier — even on Christmas and New Year’s Eve, which they choose to spend serving others instead of enjoying in their own homes. It’s a fantasy they bring to life, and a fantasy that comes at a cost, even on the day that Jesus was born in a stable, after Joseph and Mary were denied entry at the inn.