I spent four nights in a genuinely expensive hotel a few years ago, on a work trip where somebody else was paying. It was several times what I would ever spend and I was curious about what the difference actually consisted of.
Most of it was not what I expected, and some of it turned out to be worth understanding even for people who will never book it.
The room was the least of it
The room was excellent and it was not several times better than a good mid-range room.
Better bed, better linen, better bathroom, more space, quieter. All real, all incremental. If the room were the product, the pricing would be indefensible.
What I noticed after a couple of days is that the room was not the product. It was the least distinctive part of the offering.
Staffing ratio is the actual difference
The thing you are buying is people, and there are a lot of them.
Anything you asked for happened quickly, competently, and without being turned into a process. A question was answered by the person you asked rather than being referred somewhere.
The specific quality was that nothing required effort from me. A restaurant booking was made rather than suggested. A problem with a flight was resolved by someone who had already looked at the alternatives before telling me there was a problem.
That is expensive because it is labour, and it is what the price is mostly composed of.
Anticipation rather than response
The second thing and the one I found most striking.
Good service responds to what you ask for. What I encountered anticipated, which requires both attention and a system for recording what was noticed.
Small examples. The coffee I had asked for on the first morning arrived at the same time on the second without being ordered. A newspaper in the language I had spoken. The room temperature set to what I had adjusted it to the day before.
None of these individually is worth anything. Collectively they produce the sense that the place is arranged around you, and that sense is what people are buying.
What was not worth it
Being fair, several things were pure display.
An elaborate spa that I used once and which was no better than a good public pool.
Restaurants on site that were expensive and less interesting than what was outside, which I think is nearly always true and which the hotel had no interest in telling me.
Turndown service, which I actively disliked, involving somebody entering the room in the evening for no purpose I could identify.
And an enormous amount of amenity — products, extras, gestures — that produced waste and no benefit.
The thing that transferred
What I took away and have used since is that the valuable component was the reduction in effort, and some of that is purchasable in smaller amounts.
A hotel that will hold luggage properly, book things, and answer a question competently is doing the same category of thing at a fraction of the price. Small independent hotels with an owner present frequently do this better than large expensive chains.
What you are looking for is a place where somebody who knows the city is available and willing to help, which is a property of the staffing rather than of the building.
The comparison that is actually relevant
Where I have since spent more deliberately, and where it has paid off, is on the parts of a trip that are hardest rather than the parts that are nicest.
An expensive transfer on an arrival at three in the morning is worth considerably more than an expensive room.
A guide who genuinely knows a place, for a day, changes the whole trip in a way that a better hotel does not.
And paying for a direct flight rather than a connection buys hours and reduces the chance of everything going wrong, which is the same purchase as the staffing ratio in different form.
What I concluded
That the top end is not overpriced exactly. It is a labour-intensive product priced accordingly, and the labour is real.
Whether it is worth it depends on whether reduction of effort is what you want from a trip. For a business traveller arriving exhausted with things to do, obviously yes. For someone on holiday who quite enjoys working out how a city functions, considerably less so.
I enjoyed the four nights and did not envy the life. The most interesting thing I did that week was a market I found on my own, and nobody at the hotel had mentioned it.
What the staff experience of it looked like
Something I noticed and have thought about since. The level of attention I was receiving is produced by people working a demanding job with very little visible slack.
Everybody was composed, everybody was fast, and nobody was ever seen doing nothing. That is a management achievement and it is also a lot of labour held at a consistently high pitch.
I do not have a conclusion about this beyond noting that the product is people's attention, and that the people supplying it are the largest cost and generally the least discussed part of what is being sold.
The one thing I would pay for again
The arrival. Somebody meeting a delayed flight, knowing it was delayed, with the room ready and nothing to arrange.
Arriving somewhere unfamiliar and exhausted is the worst part of any trip, and it is the one point where money buys something proportionate to what it costs.