Last year, as Jeffrey Peterson was enjoying a business dinner at a Marriott hotel in Racine, WI, a waiter inadvertently spilled a glass of red wine on his cream-colored sweater — seemingly ruining it.
Hoping to make amends for the incident, the restaurant manager asked Peterson to leave his sweater with the front desk the next morning. When he returned to his room later that day, he found his sweater, stain-free, with a letter from the hotel manager as well as a bottle of the offending Cabernet.
It was, as Peterson describes it, "a terrific example of excellence in customer service."
This is just one of hundreds of hotel tales — good and bad — that consultants shared with us as part of an inaugural annual survey exploring the likes and dislikes of consultants on the road.
Did it matter to the hotel manager that Peterson was a consultant? Probably not. Good customer service, we are told, should not depend on the colors of a given customer's stripes. Still, Peterson was not just any customer. As a consulting partner within IBM Corp.'s burgeoning Business Consulting Services unit, he belonged to an elite group of road warriors — a clan dedicated to solving their clients' managerial problems and maximizing economic opportunities.
Peterson's ever-roaming professional peers belong to firms with names such as Booz Allen Hamilton, Accenture, and Bain & Company, and like Peterson they wield a keen appreciation for both luxury and value — or at least that was the point of view that first prodded us to undertake our inaugural Best Places to Stay survey.
In the end, our early musings did little to prepare us for the consulting world's plus-size frequent flyer portfolios.
While doctors and lawyers could likely match the consulting world's discriminating taste, they have neither the frequent flyer muscle nor the apparent capacity for perks magic, a skill that can apparently be learned only on the road.
If nothing else, our annual Best Places to Stay survey will help set members of consulting's rank-and-file apart from the other droves of industry executives, and better expose you and your fellow consultants for who you are: members of the world's best-traveled profession.
To begin with, we wanted to know how often you travel on business. And then, we wanted to know where you stay and why. Are your chosen hotels catering enough to you? What amenities do you prefer?
What we found out confirmed what we had heard all along — that in a good economy or a bad one, consultants have to spend much of their time on the road, meeting with the client and working on the client site, sometimes for months at a time. Videoconferencing or teleconferencing is useful, but they can't match the value of being in front of a client. And it shows, as 21 percent of respondents typically spend more than 125 nights a year away on business, 57 percent spend over 50 nights away, and 70 percent log between 51,000 and 1,000,000 frequent flyer miles.
So, while much of the lodging industry experiences a slump, due in large part to penny-pinching corporate travelers, consultants have been a notable exception.
For example, Hyatt Corporation says that of what they're able to track, its consultant customer segment grew by 2 percent in 2002, when general market conditions saw a decline of anywhere from 2 to 3 percent.
"Any time you can identify segments of business that grow during times of economic difficulty, and that's certainly what we've seen in this area, it becomes important to us," says Ty Helms, senior vice president of sales, Hyatt Hotels Corporation.
It's not as though the consulting firms are immune to a down economy — far from it. However, even while many firms continue to struggle, 44 percent of those surveyed say that the challenging economic climate has had "no impact at all" on the amount or type of hotels they stay at. And the economy appears to have done little to dull the consulting world's appetite for luxury, given that Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, The Ritz-Carlton, W Hotels, and Westin Hotels & Resorts are counted among the most popular hotels of choice for consultants.
But it was Marriott Hotels & Resorts, and what many consultants have deemed their superior customer service, that came out on top — as 85 percent of those surveyed had stayed at a Marriott this past year and 29 percent considered it their favorite hotel.

The Best Places to Stay 2003

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