Evaluating a Hotel

Can a love encounter be evaluated? This question jumps to the arena once in a while to spur me into explaining what argument or sensation helps me ponder the values of a hotel in my weekly review in EL PAIS and if such a handbook justifies the numerical evaluation of the facilities and services when the current establishment is meant for its singularity or personal character. Some hoteliers inquire this to me on Facebook with more curiosity than a hurt right of reply.

“I think that’s what our guests do with their opinions”, Antonio Gómez (Quintana del Caleyo) argues, who deposits in the prescriber the responsibility of evaluating “the spaces, the architecture, the place, the charm, the breakfast, the chats, the treatment, the silence, any other lived sensation” in the same way the that clients inwardly rate the experiences and emotions obtained in the hotel. The review or the complaint must serve the hotel as a continuous improvement tool, Palmira Rodrigues holds. “The problem resides when the evaluators measure the emotions or sensations with the same parameters they use to measure the tangible.”

Because this is the debate provoked by the journalistic assegai that the proprietor of the Consolacion hotel, Ignacio Mas de Xaxas, brandishes towards us with the prod of knowing he is object of evaluation this same weekend by my rubric in El Viajero. Object of a scoring table that to this day he doesn’t not know of… “Can an experience be granted points? A sensation? A state? An emotion? An experience?” Because, as our interlocutor claims, that what we want the new hotels of sensations to be. Emotion in front of reason. Heart in front of liver. My hunch in front of my systolic pulse.

So many times, I have declared myself not supportive of the official classification by stars of hotels that now it will be hard to find an argument in favor of my own weekly scoring. They don’t hold themselves up in purity, I know. The worst hotel in the world can be perform as the best one day. It’s the power of a smile what matter, the flutter of a hunch, the blow of a whisper, the tone of the sky, the density of the atmosphere… There’s so many imperceptible things, barely imaginable, intangible or shallow in their essence that it results abrupt to tag them with suspense, approved or notable.

Why then, do we score them? The language of communication is more precise the more conventional it becomes. We all know that a mouse is a small mammal of the rodent order, family of the murine. But the reader will understand that will I write these lines, I don’t have my mouse spinning on a wheel in his cage, but motionless on my desk, next to my keyboard, and not precisely because I have domesticated it. We use a linguistic convention or a mathematical structure to understand each other, and thus, communicate. This is the context of the phrase or the equation that places us in its condition. It’s the analog reference that illustrates for us with precision. By mathematical convention, 0 means nullity, and 10 tetractys, sephiroth, totality. Symbol of perfection. The ten lamps. The ten virgins. The ten talents. The base of our algebraic system. The shirt of Pelé and Zidane.

Of course it’s hard to understand the distinction between a 6 and a 6,5, as well as between 7 and 8. But we know a 3 breakfast is vulgar and 1 inedible. That the 10 in attention doesn’t refer to Bo Derek, but to hotel that lavishes you from the moment you enter to the moment you leave, with name and last name, nobly and personally. That 2 tranquility is a suit of clubs, while a 9 elevates you to seventh heaven. That a building that is falling doesn’t deserve an 8, nor that false historicism that some have fallen upon because they believe to be someone in architecture. It’s true that other scores make me uncomfortable and doubt, like the ones granted to the facility. I tremble when I qualify with a 5 an austere hotel in front of one that puts the red carpet for your and delights your children’s palate with a kid’s menu. What for some is a soothing balm –silence-, for families is pure boredom. There’s those who can’t stand the noise of the television in the dining area and those who can’t have dinner without watching the goals of the week. There’s types of people for everything, hotels for just a few.

Because it’s impossible to make everyone happy, we promote niche establishments and to each one choosing their own. The maximum grade can fall upon the goals hotel as well as the silence one. To each sheep, a similar sensation. With good understanding that my inclinations towards silence are only worth what my understanding and circumstance are, without postulating myself as pope or father of a church. If my scoring can work as a reference, it’s become some read me, believe me, watch me, and don’t get complexed. Subjectively. With one’s own signature.