Why Do We Concern Ourselves as hotel marketing consultants with Food and Beverage Service Levels - Conception and Training - How To Really Get Repeat Business and Really "Market"

The best "guest at a banquet event" experience that I have been lucky enough to have was at a Hilton back in 1990 in Detroit.

And I have been to a few - from Buenos Aires to Stockholm, from Istanbul to Vancouver. I have been graced with superb five star snootiness to ranch yard BBQs. In fact, I, myself, have been responsible for my own lectures in how to be snooty, how to be superior to the guests so that they know that they have entered a palace of "foodies" run by a tyrant of an Exec Chef who could easily pull the table cloth out from under them accented ,not with a sprig of rosemary, but with a comment of withering disdain.

Yes, I have lost my way in that world of self satisfied superior pretension. I did, after all, start in a French Gourmet restaurant of endless pretention back in 1968. I'vce labored as a busboy in a London restaurant of gigantic ego and only a coerced, beaten team.

What happened at that Hilton banquet back in 1990?

Yes the waiter had two tablee of 12. Yes, the table was a dreaded 72" round that inhabits almost every hotel ball room and, yes, there was one of those ghastly, overdone, floral concoctions in the middle that went up five feet toward a ceiling up among the Rockies and, yes, the bottom of the thing allowed me to see my fellow table mates 8 feet away. Why did the banquet department think that looking at a table mate 8 feet away would make it possible to converse?

It is obvious that the banquet department had heedlessly done what almost every department does: create an impossible seating arrangement for their guests.

But our waiter knew what to do: care for us with warmth, assured presence of mind that allowed her to control us, that allowed her to stop whatever she was doing to take care of an immediate need. Not for her were the grace notes of re-folding our napkins while we were away from the table. Not for her, was any snooty wine service. She just took care of us, bending down to us, whispering into our ears, being our mother. We were in her hands. That was all. She was not a server , she was the major-domo mother, telling us to eat up. What?, did we not like the first course?, could she get us something else? . . . Of course we demurred but the offer hung there for all of us to feel good about. We were people, we were being acknowledged.

That's why I do what I do - to pass on that waiter's innate wisdom. To make it possible for more people to have better experiences so that the property can have better and better revenue - not because of advertising but because of the prime marketing factor: caring love.