When a New York hotel announced this spring that it would soon bag room service for a "grab and go" market in its lobby, the national media rose en masse
and churned out thousands of words and pictures about how the change
represented a fundamental shift in the national culture. Me, I just
pulled out my copy of Weekend at the Waldorf.
The 1945 melodrama, an Americanized version of Grand Hotel,
stars Lana Turner as a tough-cookie stenographer working at the
even-then iconic Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Some of the action takes
place in the hotel's Starlight Roof, one of the Waldorf's
dinner-and-dancing spots. The hotel band, led by Xavier Cugat, gets more than a few minutes of screen time. Cugat even gets sheet music delivered by a room-service waiter.
The Waldorf doesn't have a steno pool for guests anymore. The
stenographer's office has been turned into a sundries shop. The
Starlight Roof long ago became function space. The Waldorf's house band
is gone, too, and the flamboyant Cugat has been in bandleader heaven
since 1990.
My point? Hotels eventually get rid of stuff that travelers stop valuing. And they constantly change things like bathrooms and front desks and lobbies to keep up with the times. So why should a business traveler be shocked — or the media egged into action— when a singular hotel swaps out room service for a 24-hour lobby market?
The plain fact of the matter is that the concept of food delivered to
your guestroom has been changing for years. The idea of room service
isn't written in hotel stone. It's no more eternal than Xavier Cugat or pitchers of fresh water delivered to your room, a practice that disappeared when hotels began installing en-suite bathrooms.
Source : http://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/blog/seat2B/2013/07/room-service-part-of-hotel-adaption.html
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