Hotel establishments are finding increasingly inventive ways of encouraging clientele to stay with them as opposed to their competition. The credit crunch has hit this business as much as any other and it has become necessary for them to offer more services to make a stay more convenient for visitors.



Some of the top hotels run a personal answering service for their visitors but there is talk in the business of this being stopped due to the indiscretion of visitors, callers and answering service staff. This has led to some embarrassment in high places and both MP's and high flying businessmen have found themselves subject to paparazzi attention when they thought they were safe.

Top business people have been making it their practice to book up rooms and then use the answering service to run much of their business from the comfort of the hotel suite. This is, in fact, an illegal practice and as such, needs to be stopped. A hotel answering service should be used to relay occasional messages, not as a secretarial service.

One top Tory MP was recently caught out in an indiscretion with the assistance of a member of staff situated on the answering service switchboard. Once a woman is scorned, she develops this in-built radar that can detect a cheater at fifty paces. The woman in question was aware from the messages she had taken for the MP that he was having a liaison with a certain Madam Whiplash. Knowing the MP to be married, when she also took a message from the MP's wife announcing an imminent visit, she accidently forgot to forward the message to the relevant party. The mess that ensued was paparazzi fodder for several days!

It was hoped that this service would be one that would be useful to all hotel guests, and had been working quite well but the incident with the MP has caused unrest and mis-trust and the service is being used in a limited way now. People have lost trust and this particular hotel are now looking for other methods of attracting attention.

Given that this hotel is in such a popular area of London, they are, in fact, surrounded by many hotels that all cater for top businessmen and women and it is thought that, now their reputation has already been sullied and they have lost the type of clientele they previously enjoyed, that they may start letting rooms to obvious paparazzi members so that nearby hotel guests can be spied on and the hotels bookings are once again set to increase.

Obviously in this case, the answering service proved to be the downfall of at least one man. Or at least, the scorned woman did! So, does this mean that hotels should withdraw the service for fear of it happening again or should they simply grill the potential telephone operators to see how their previous relationships fared and whether there are any served sentencing for bunny boiling.

As with all things in life, there will always be someone to abuse the system. Is it right that as soon as someone does, that the system should be stopped? That everyone should lose out because of certain members of the community taking advantage or taking umbrage at someone else's behaviour? These are questions that hotels need to consider carefully before implementing ways that are supposed to boost their business.