Views from no 1

View from member number 1  - Random thoughts after being abroad

Still in an international vein, catch up with the globetrotting observations of our first ever member…… astute, provocative, down right funny and priceless!

Abroad is fun and the service tourist is content with observing the habits of the service givers as they bring you a glass of beer, some sumptuous regional dish, deny your booking ever existed and tell you that the taxi meter is broken and should be ignored at all times?

Yes it is that season again when SOCAP members fan out all over and benchmark the world's service. I await reports from Beijing from those who can still manage a keyboard although breathing and talking at the same time may be difficult. (A close friend went there earlier this year pre-Olympics and coughed for three weeks on her return).

So what were your principal findings? Elaborate and discuss. In the meantime, here are mine.

1.  the gap between service success and failure is very narrow – we had booked a flight months before the day of departure. The travel agent had not told us that the flight time had been brought forward by 2 hours. We were the last to check in and there were no queues for anything -  it turned out to be the perfect walk-through airport experience as we progressed through the checks and barriers to arrive in the departures lounge with only 10 minutes to sit around before boarding. But it could have been very different if we had not decided to take a taxi instead of relying on train and tube. We would have missed the wedding etc etc. You can imagine the letters - "trip of lifetime ruined by your failure to communicate etc"
2. Is service all the same everywhere? The universal rule of room service always seems to apply whereby the delivery always arrives at the moment of most embarrassment – naked, in loo, shower, bath etc. No amount of designer Frette sheets with high thread counts can change that.
3. How do you cope with hotel air conditioning – off and sweat but at least in silence? On, chill out but stay awake all night as the fan cuts in thunderously just when you are nodding off?
4. Incomprehension of customer requests – that sinking feeling as you realise that the query about rinse agent that you have just asked the till guy in a New York neighbourhood supermarket has been met with total incomprehension.
5. Got three free drinks included in a NYC $15 brunch but they were very watery.
6. Tim Hortons in Canada may be better for breakfast than MacDonalds.
7. Not the way we do things at home – if you reserve a seat on an Amtrak train, it is free boarding in the great Ryanair and Easyjet tradition and sitting next to the person you want can involved complex negotiations with people who may be foreign.
8. Swiss and Canadians share an obsession with clean loos and Canada has rather more of them.
9. Cheerfulness is a great asset amongst customers and the people who serve them. Canadians are good at this although bus travel was revealed to be rather more hazardous than we thought. http://www.cbc.ca/canada/manitoba/story/2008/07/31/greyhound-transcanada.html
10. Porter Air is the best way to go from Toronto to NYC by air.
11. A very good lunch in NYC can be had at the Metropolitan Museum.
12. You can buy a very smooth umbrella for this rainy summer at the Frick Collection also on Park Avenue as well as seeing a very pleasant portrait of the young Emma Hamilton if you follow Lord Nelson's career.
13. Rebecca our waitress at the Ajax Ontario branch of The Keg was a hyper trained member of the new premises team and freeze froze us in the icy blast of her pumped up personality. Is it good to touch customers who are staring at you in a peculiarly British mixture of astonishment, fear and embarrassment? They might explode. But hey I remember her name and my lobster was good and astonishingly cheap.
14. Got a very good pair of off the shelf reading glasses for £7.
15. Anywhere abroad is cheaper than Britain – with the $2 to £ exchange rate at least.
16. Not knowing when you are well off – North American motorists
17. The weather everywhere is weird.
18. One of these days, I must get better seats on the overnight flight – twice now we have managed to choose that row against the bulkhead with the loos behind it. Aircraft loo flushes go bang in the night.
19. Earphone sets on planes will be chargeable this autumn. I doubt this will make them any more likely to stay on your ears. Take your own in future.
20. Rubbish dumps are now the preferred habitat of black bears.

August 2008