The waiter has two jobs. So does everyone in the service industry.
A waiter who doesn’t bring your food has failed. A waiter who brings your food but ruins your experience has also failed, just in a different way. We refer to both of these elements with the same word: “service”.
Two completely different failure modes, one job title. The waiter sells a result (correct order arrives, hot) and an experience (the welcome, the rhythm of the table, the small talk, the upsells that don’t feel pushy).
Most service jobs are like this. A masseuse sometimes sells a result (your glutes stop screaming) and sometimes sells an experience (60 minutes of affectionate touch from a fellow primate). A hotel sells a result (somewhere safe to sleep, proximity to the places you want to be, a gym, food without leaving the building) and an experience (the pleasantness of all of it).
The word “service” hides two different products. Once you notice this, every purchase decision gets easier, because you stop accidentally paying for the one you don’t want.
(People miscategorize their purchases all the time. Doctors, for instance, are in the service industry. Personally, I only value “bedside manner” insofar as it impacts my medical results, generally through team cohesion.)
The Hotel Switch
This idea showed up today while I switched hotels in Budapest.
Hotel 1 was the Kimpton BEM. $340 per night. Sauna, gym, restaurant, bar, room service, a quick walk to the Danube. A small room. No refrigerator. Paid laundry. Beautiful experience, modest result.
Hotel 2 is an aparthotel. $61 per night. A one-bedroom apartment (separate bedroom and living room). A kitchen with stove, oven, microwave, dishes, refrigerator. A laundry machine. One block from the biggest ruin bar in Budapest.
For the same money, I’d take the aparthotel every time: twice the space, a real kitchen, a better location, an in-unit laundry machine. The Kimpton costs roughly 5.5x as much. At that price, you’re buying 1) The experience of being attended to, and 2) Reliability (of room, food, and experience: Kimpton is a reputable brand.
The Preference
I’m probably odd in that I almost always want the result.
I prefer my infrastructure solves specific needs. If it solves the need, the work is done; the pleasure of the experience is secondary to the solving of the problem.
The key exception: play. I don’t play golf to get the ball in the hole. I play golf to play golf. Play is the rare context where the experience IS the product, and I’m clear on that going in.
Perhaps some people see visiting a hotel as play. I see it as infrastructure.
The Cost
The aparthotel model isn’t free. You have to learn it. Photos lie. Hosts ghost. There’s no front desk at this residence: if you fail their check-in process, their automated system won’t email you the login code.
The variance is real: I once caught a nasty cough from a booking.com stay due to mold on the walls.
The result-first approach trades reliability for upside on the days nothing goes wrong. Most days, nothing goes wrong. And my skill at spotting good residences has improved. But I improved… by making mistakes.
The Result
As I write this I’m on the couch in our new living room, and Partner is squishing my feet. My feet hurt because the Kimpton was a 45-minute walk from the lively downtown area (from which Partner and I walked back to the Kimpton at 2am last night).
I’m enjoying the experience of a feet-squish from someone I love. Still, I’d rather we jumped to the result where my feet stopped hurting.
Julian Wise 