The Beurocracy and Extortion of Hotel Laundry

My biggest pet peeve of all in the Hotel Industry, is when they use your residence as an excuse to overcharge for basic services.This is most common in Phone Calls, Laundry, Movies, and sometimes even Food and Room Service. There are hotls where it is so bad that you can hardly clal it hospitality, because all you get is a bed. Other annoying ones are having to pay to use the Spa or Gym when you are already paying for your room, having to pay for Exhorbitant Parking, and even Wi Fi. The French and Americans Corporate Chains are the worst for this. The best situation I ever had was in New Zealand. I needed to call the US, and asked a guy in asea side little hotel in Northern New Zeland how much the call would be... "About 60 cents a minute" he told me.. I was a bit stunned, it seemed cheap, so I asked him why, since most people would charge at least a dollar,but with a smile on my face... he answered, kind of scratching his head "Becasue that's what it'll cost me!" as if who the heck would think of asking for more when you already paid for the room.. this is hospitality! The worst I ever saw was the Ritz Carleton on Central Park South. They had the audacity to charge 17 USD for the first minute of the call. The employees here tend to be a pretty brainwashed crew, but I once got a guy to admit to me at the frint desk that people go nuts sometimes when they see it, sometimes even having hung up but still having to pay the 17 dollars. A good new trend is being charged one buck for national and two bucks for International calls of any length, which I encountered at the Mandarin Oriental. They seem to have gone with some Internet Calling System, some kind of Corporate Vonnage and the woman who ran the hotel, who looked a lot like Nicole Kidman, would only admit that's what it was, and that it was working pretty well. It seemed fair to me, even though I think it charged me a buck for local calls as well.. there was an upside, and I could call peoples cell phones for the same one buck if they lived in DC but had never changed out an old number.
Back to Laundry..no one wants to count and touch dirty laundry,but they turn it into an accounting project worthy of Ft Knox Gold.. First they give you a Plastic Bag (the Hotel Faena in Buenos Aires actually had cool spandex ones, I will admit to having stole the one out of my room, which was more than made up for by what I was paying, and it was the best laundry bag I have ever had.. it caught on fire on the muffler of my motorcycle in China once, unfortunately.. sigh..), then they expect you to fill out this fucking form.. for what you are paying, can't they just take it an fill it out. the whole thing is about making sure
A. You know how much you are getting fucked by the price of each item.
B. They can claim they didn't loose anything, which I can see people going ballistic about, but how hard is it to just wash one bag at a time or just count it yourself downstairs.
C Seeming officious, as officious means money, and money is what they are after. So if you go to a Chinese laundry even down the block from a place like this, they can do say 5 pounds of laundry for 9 bucks, and in two hours, but hotels, they act like they are washing the queens garter. Now I get that a little pretension is actually kind of fun, makes a hotel stay feel special, but there are limits.. so my worst case was again in the Ritz Carelton in NYC, right there on Central Park. I was in a bad mood, and just wanted my laundry washed and folded. An employee in a nice suit showed up and demanded I do the paperwork.I think she was from Costa Rica. I told her I wasn't doing any paperwork, I just wanted it washed and folded, simple as that.. I'm a customer,not a clerk, and it's a pretty simple request. She blew her top and stormed out of my room after I kept refusing. I got my laundry the next day, and mind you, I usually wear jeans and T shirts, and it was all on metal hangers covered in plastic and paper (a huge environmental waste). She had had it all dry cleaned, and they gave me a bill for 450 dollars. Again, there is a chinese guy 4 blocks away who could have done it for 9.
The one bright spot in this game was the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, one of the coolest hotels on earth. Somehow the Thai have a way, in the customer service realm, of actually making it feel worth it.. I did the same thing, just gave em a bag, told em I wasn't going to sort through my dirty clothes, just get it back to me clean and folded... Well, for either 45 or 75 bucks, can't remember which, but somehow after the Ritz experience it seemed worth it, it came back in a basket,wrapped in some gauze and a bit of plastic, but topped with flowers and I think parts were even wrapped in Banana Leaves..I can't make this up.. for once it seemed worth it...