Stayed at the Latham Hotel. [This is a back-dated review: I stayed in the hotel and made some notes at the time I was there, but the majority of the text is written some time later.] The hotel’s website does its best to position the Latham as a reasonably upscale place:
The Latham is a Classic European-style, boutique hotel that is comparable to the finest European tradition of small, elegant, and professionally staffed hotels.
But– well, no. The Latham has a valuably central location and an appealing historical exterior, but its website is trying to put it into a class it doesn’t belong to by any stretch. The furnishings are all shabby and well worn; the lighting fixtures don’t all work. Service at the front desk can be slow or bored. Phoning down to the desk from my room, I didn’t always get an answer, even if I let the phone ring and ring.
All in all, the place has the appearance of having faded from better days. I can believe that at some point in the past it was elegant and professionally staffed, but the furnishings have degraded and the staff training is apparently not what it used to be. It’s a bit like Thirtieth Street Station in this respect — once-grand architecture, some bits that are still impressive, but also a lot of grubbiness and a number of employees who are less than delighted to see customers. The Latham costs about the same amount as some midrange chain hotels; the latter would be in better repair but also a bit less interesting. It’s up to you which you’d prefer, but in no case should you go expecting the Latham to be a luxury hotel.
So here’s the challenge: can we spot that this hotel isn’t as good as the website wants us to think?
There are some clues. First, the list of room amenities:
All rooms are furnished with voice mail, coffee makers, hair dryers, terry-cloth robes, irons with full-sized boards, and free wireless high-speed Internet access . Complimentary newspaper delivery is available every weekday. Nightly turn down service is available upon request. Most of the rooms are decorated in a Victorian style, greeting you with a warm, comfortable atmosphere upon entering the room.
I’m all for free wireless, but most of these things are fairly ordinary amenities even for a low- to midrange chain hotel. I’ve stayed at plenty of tedious, run-down airport inns that came with all the same physical features except possibly the robes.
Turndown service is less common, but turndown service “on request” is quite a bit different from having turndown service for everyone: they probably realize that most guests won’t ask for it, and in this context it essentially means that they’re willing to straighten up your room again a bit in the evening if you’ve made enough of a mess in the meantime. Much of the point of turndown service (inasmuch as there is one; that may deserve a post of its own) is to make the guest feel looked-after, to make the room welcoming in the evening; the charm is precisely that you haven’t had to fuss about it or request it, but that someone is just automatically seeing to these things for you. It’s more psychological than necessary.
As for the “Victorian style”, well, it’s not necessary for every hotel to be decorated as a Philippe Starck exercise in ironic modern self-awareness, but “Victorian style” is also at least potentially a warning that they haven’t redecorated in ages. Also telling is what they don’t say: they don’t list a brand name for their toiletries; they don’t describe the quality of the bed linen; they don’t talk about the fittings in the bathroom. These may all seem like fairly fatuous things to list, but they are very standard components of a room description at a luxury boutique hotel, and their absence here is a hint.
Second point: in the selection of hotel images, there is only one that shows the inside of a guest room. The rest are of public spaces, and they’re all pretty small; too small to give away dirty carpets or tatty furniture.
Third point: tripadvisor. I advise taking tripadvisor and other online hotel-site reviews with a very large grain of salt: it’s been documented that they’re often tampered with (positively or negatively) by the hotel’s owners and rivals; there’s nothing to prevent people from posting reviews even when they haven’t really stayed someplace, or haven’t done so at all recently; they’re subject to all sorts of statistical problems (a hotel with only a few reviews being unjustly elevated or slammed); individual reviews are often brief and unspecific about what was good or bad. There’s also a problem with misidentification; not all sites change their review pages when a hotel has changed hands or been rebranded, which means that you can sometimes find a new hotel being saddled with reviews of whatever used to occupy the same building, even if (as is usually the case) the previous hotel went out of business for good reason and the new owners have completely remodeled and re-envisioned the place. And finally, there’s nothing to tell you what each reviewer’s prior experience is. These people aren’t professional hotel evaluators, and they may or may not be particularly well-traveled; and a hotel that looks extremely posh to a Motel 6 customer may seem quite a lot different to someone who’s used to staying at Kimpton properties.
But for the Latham, tripadvisor actually does have enough information to be useful. There are dozens of reviews, and the negative ones are consistent in naming the shabbiness of the furniture and the attitude of the staff as major drawbacks, often describing specific negative experiences with staff. The strong positives say things like
We’ve stayed at the Latham several times and love the hotel. It’s boutique style with a small lobby. The location is superb, the rooms are comfortable, attractive and not treated with an overpowering scent. The staff is friendly and helpful, and it even has a small gym and computer.
I’m not sure what they mean about the computer — the rooms don’t come with computers, certainly, so perhaps they’re referring to the little business center. Still, the fact that the reviewers are impressed by (1) the presence of a small gym and (2) the absence of overpowering air freshener gives some idea that these people do not in general frequent luxury boutique hotels. Indeed, the positive reviews are apt to parrot bits of the marketing copy from the website; not so much that they look like they’re necessarily fraudulent, but just enough to suggest that people who liked the hotel are ones who don’t have a lot of experience with other places and have simply bought into the Latham’s self-presentation. There’s nothing insincere in this, and I’m not mocking it — but it’s worth noting.
What should the Latham do here? It’s perhaps a little unfair to expect a hotel to advertise itself explicitly as having shabby furniture and bored staff; on the other hand, the website has some phrasings that might lead one to expect better. But what’s really deceptive is not anything about the copy, but the quality of the web design: the muted colors, the smooth roll-over highlighting and photograph changes, the layout of the page with the menu on the left, and even the choice of entries in that menu are all more reminiscent of the website for, say, the Alexis Hotel in Seattle than for a Comfort Inn or (to be a little more charitable) the Philadelphia downtown Marriott (which, incidentally, is considerably more comfortable than the Latham, as long as you don’t have an aversion to impersonal convention palaces). The Latham’s website is a luxe website. In fact, it’s quite a lot better designed in several practical respects than the websites for some far superior places: for instance, the Auberge du Vieux Port in Montreal is a near-perfect hotel, but has a frankly irritating website, full of bits that take too long to load and pop-up images that obscure things you were trying to read.
I can see the problem, a bit: the Latham needs to communicate that it is a small hotel and one whose appeal turns more on its personality (particularly the architecture), price (reasonable, especially for center city Philadelphia), and location (exceptionally convenient) than on the amenities it can offer. There are other budget or low-range hotels with character, but those often tend toward the kitsch or else have a sort of inexpensive-by-design approach; obviously the Latham can’t pitch itself in either of those categories. But attempting to market itself in the luxury boutique niche raises expectations it can’t possibly fulfill, and produces a lot of disappointed customers. I suspect if they revamped their website to be just a bit downmarket (though it pains me to suggest that any website should be less well-designed) they would actually reach more of the sorts of customers who want the sort of thing they have to offer.
