It's quite true. Back in the day when I was working at the Park Hyatt and the Palmer House and later at the Marriott, all in Chicago, things were quite different. In my day a guest made a reservation and the first thing we did was check to see what room they stayed in last time. We tried to put them in the same room. We tried to make sure we had a list of the things they had in their room previously. While I was working at the Hyatt, my first job was to file the guest info cards so that the Front Desk Manager would be prepared. I got to see what Billie Dee Williams had in his room and which brand of champagne Carol Channing likes to drink.
When I went to the Palmer House, I learned to wake people up in five languages ( French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Japanese) because wake up calls were manual back then and you actually called the room until the guest stopped sounding groggy. I learned how to order a replacement wedding ring at 3:00 am and I learned how to find out where a guest was without seeming intrusive. We took our jobs seriously and that meant making sure that even though there were over 2,000 bedrooms at the Palmer House, we cared about each guest completely. We made them feel that they were at home and taking care to make sure they enjoyed every minute of it. When they checked out, we asked each of them when they were coming back - if they didn't give us a new reservation, we were not doing our job.
Now you check into a hotel and no one knows how to pronounce your name and no one even has the sense to ask - they throw you a key and the room may or may not be clean. If you need something to eat, the person at the desk probably has never eaten at a place in the area, unless it's McDonald's. No one takes note of your return, back in my day we had a bed check list to make sure there was no one we had to search for. If we didn't send you out with our driver, the doorman called us to say the guest was returning. Consequently, none of our guests wound up wandering off into the lake or dead in an overnight brawl. We always had
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