As a tour operator serving the UK Domestic market, we would regularly include Regional Press Nights in our partnerships with the top West End Shows. The production could schedule the date of the event, and either stipulate which UK regions to focus on or be advised by our excellent Travel Press PR, but we almost always insisted on three things;
1) It can be any night of the week, as long as it’s Friday Night;
2) Each title should be allocated a pair of tickets;
3) We would always use the same hotel.
There was usually some resistance to the first two points. After all, most shows would rather make use of midweek inventory, and surely only one journalist per title would be writing the piece up? It didn’t take long to explain. The object of the event was to promote London Theatre Breaks, and, to most regional theatre-break purchasers, London, the most exciting city on Earth, was always a key, if not the key part of the equation. By allowing journalists to bring a guest, for a Friday night performance, we could give them the full experience (dinner before the show, interval and post-show drinks, etc.) and then they and their guest would be free to enjoy Saturday in town together. Just like the visitors from the regions that their articles would be written to attract.*
There’s no business like show business…
The fact that we always used the same hotel for these events might take a little longer to explain. Especially to entertainment partners unaware of the challenges faced 24/7 by accommodation providers. Theatre patrons are only allowed in the building for three or four hours on average.** Better still, they are generally required to sit in silence, immobile, and in near-darkness. How great is that! With their paying customers unseen, unmoving, and (hopefully) unheard (apart from providing applause) the shows may, at their sole discretion, allow patrons to stretch their legs for twenty minutes. They are even permitted to talk to each other during this ‘Interval’ and spend a penny, but its main function, of course, is to allow them to spend several pennies on beverages, ice-creams and an extensive range of merchandise.
The hotel part of the equation is nowhere near as low maintenance.
And as organisers of the Press Trips, we were risking our relationship with some of the biggest shows in the world (no, make that THE biggest) so the last thing we could afford was negative feedback because of an issue at the hotel.***
The owners of our Press Trip hotel also had a second property, a couple of hundred yards away. It was (and is) one of the most famous hotels in the world, and they decided, quite rightly, to transfer the General Manager of our precious Press Trip Hotel across to run it. It should have worried us, but it didn’t. Because the thing about this GM (and all great GMs and Theatre Mangers) was that his team were even more eager to get it right when he wasn’t working than when he was. His own extremely high standards of customer care, his attention to detail, and his obsession with delivering a truly memorable experience, to every guest, had been hard-wired into his team. And to such an extent that when he wasn’t in the building, his spirit still inhabited it. With knobs on! The team not only knew what to do, and how to do it, they also knew why.
But no-one rides a tightrope without a safety net. At least, not for long. The GM’s personality was the engine powering the experiences, but it was feedback that provided the wheels. Kept it firmly on the road. The hotel actively (but unobtrusively) elicited guest feedback at every stage (pre-stay, in-stay and post-stay) as well as providing a clear communication line for staff to report issues, anticipate potential problems, and suggest enhancements.
Time moved on. The original GM was given the entire group of iconic Five Star landmark hotels to run. And when his successor was headhunted (he himself now heads up another massive London hotel group) a third GM had the honour of hosting our Press Night guests on behalf of London’s world-leading West End shows. Other key personnel changed all the time, of course. But the ethos never did. And neither did the consistency of the quality of experience delivered.
There are a couple of areas where show business and hotel business overlap.
After all, they both involve buildings and people. And ensuring that the time those people spend inside those buildings is not only pleasurable, and memorable, but frequently exceeds expectations. This may involve hundreds, or thousands, of people, each with different skill-sets, different skill levels (and lives and dreams of their own) who each need to be equipped, empowered and motivated to provide exceptional service. It will always, always, always, involve hundreds of thousands of hours of ‘occupancy’, wherein any second can bring forth any number of calamities, each one of which possessing the potential to threaten that essential, but quintessentially precarious, alchemy: from customers to honoured guests, through to patrons, active advocates and ambassadors.
David Thomas 29 November 2024
*The only other rule applied to the journalists themselves… These were Travel Writers and Editors, not Arts Desk, and if they didn’t deliver first class coverage for all the partners in the joint press-pack (the show, the hotel, the hosting restaurants and bars …and of course the tour operator) then they would not be receiving any similar invitations any time soon.
**We generally allow ticket-holders into the venue up to forty-five minute before curtain (the ‘Incoming’ ...so called because it boosts non-ticket ‘income’?)
***More often than not, the biggest risk was that our Press Guests were so comfortable at the hotel they needed to make a supreme effort to actually get in the cab and come and see the show.
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