THE CHINESE MARKET - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 229

hotel rooms by 2015—a thought that raises fears of one big hotel bubble that will burst
and send occupancy rates plunging.
David Barboza, the Shanghai bureau chief for the New York Times , who has lived in
China for over a decade, has seen hotel business shoot through the roof. “They are doing
very well with room rates up and labor costs still low. They give you great service with no
labor costs to speak of—about the same as in Mexico.”
A few years ago the Chinese government published figures showing that the average
monthly wage for Chinese chambermaids was $97 and for hotel receptionists, $133. (In
Hong Kong a receptionist was paid $1,305.) At the same time, international-brand hotels
were charging $125 a night for a room. While wages have gone up—analysts say to around
$200 a month on average—so have average hotel prices to $225. China's five-star hotels
are no longer one of the world's great bargains.
Low wages are an essential source of those handsome profits. When Deng opened up
the economy, he outlawed strikes in 1982 and kept Chinese unions under government
control. In return, the unions have kept labor costs down, attracting foreign investment as
well as flooding the global market with inexpensive goods. It is a public secret that union
officials expect discreet cash payments from hotels and other services for tourists as a token
of gratitude for those low labor costs.
Barboza said that in the mind of the government, the tourism sector has been a huge
success and there was no reason to change its formula. “The Chinese state rakes in the
money with licenses and monopolies and partnerships. Why would officials give it up?”
All these blue-sky predictions are hard-won. The day-to-day reality of running a hotel in
China is complicated. During my four-day stay at the Marriott City Wall, I could see the
cultural gaps and disconnects. At lunch one day at the hotel's dim sum restaurant, I waited
half an hour with no sign of my food. When I asked my waitress why none of my dishes
had appeared, she answered, “You should have ordered something else.” At breakfast one
morning a hostess interrupted a man filling his plate at the buffet, asking him to sign a
check with his free hand so she could check off his room number. He wasn't happy.
Albar said Marriott has worked overtime training new Chinese employees to be sensit-
ive to sometimes extreme cultural misunderstanding.
“China is a completely different game than the other Asian countries, where hospitality
is second nature,” he said. “The Chinese are animated people of wonderful character but
little concept of hospitality, of putting guests first. Maybe it is communism. There are
small things. You have to explain that when opening the door to bring in the luggage you
have to watch out and not hit the guest in the nose.”
“There is also the bigger issue of saying thank you and please. Some Chinese consider
saying thank you and please as somehow degrading. It's understandable. These people
have had to be fighters, survivors. We are saying now, your job is to help others, not com-
pete with them.”