A Purple Nation Blog

I’ve just achieved another first in my life and bought my first £90 tank of fuel. Accepted, it’s a big tank and it’s diesel so I get to pay more for what I’m told is a more environmentally friendly fuel, which I don’t quite understand, but it’s quite a bit more than I paid this time last year. None of us are immune from the impact of rising oil prices so let’s hope these stabilise or even reduce as the year moves on.  

In the meantime, life goes on and life needs a bit of quality as well as continuity. On which note our contribution this month to the quality aspects of why we all work as hard as we do and do as much as we do is to launch our Campaign for The Real Weekend.  

When you think about it, the relentless march of technology has meant that for most of us we no longer go to work, work comes to us. So whilst most of us are all earning way more than we were ten years ago our hourly rate has probably gone through the floor, mine has for sure. The fat chap at the bank who used to take care of my accounts is now replaced by a secure password and I get to do it all myself, so that’s an hour a week of extra work. I’ve got this really bad habit of turning my laptop on at 11 o’clock at night, just in case there’s an important message that I really need to deal with (at 11 o’clock at night) and even if there isn’t the blackberry vibrates away until it gets read, day or night. 

By the time the weekend comes it can feel more like an essential R&R break than a weekend, so here’s our big idea for the summer. The Campaign for The Real Weekend

Who says the weekend has to be Saturday and Sunday? Since work takes place at any given time of the day or night why can’t the weekend be a bit more flexible? We think it’s anytime between Thursday and Monday and we’ve priced our purplehotels to reflect that. Apparently in Britain we are the most overworked people in the European Union in so far as the number of hours we regularly put in per week. Well done us. We should be proud of that, but shouldn’t we also have the most weekend breaks of anyone in the European Union? I would say that wouldn’t I, but you know it makes sense.  

If you’ve got a comment or a thought on this I’d love to hear it, besides that have a really cool weekend away somewhere soon from £39.00 inclusive of breakfast and VAT. 

Sign up for The Campaign for The Real Weekend and join the Purple Nation.

April in England.

The things that have been occupying our minds in recent weeks are breakfast and weekends.  I think the purple hotels now offer not only the best, but the best value, breakfast in the entire hotel industry in the UK and if you have evidence to the contrary please let me know. For £7.95 you get everything from fresh natural yoghurt and fresh fruit salad to bacon, beans and eggs and a choice of two tortillas, that’s Spanish omelettes, one vegetarian and one meat. I don’t know what it is that always makes me think I’m going to have the healthy stuff; the fruit salad, the yoghurt, the high fibre cereal and then makes me go straight to the hot plate and have a wedge of tortilla and maybe a bit of bacon on the side. Oh well, a little of what you fancy does you good.  The point is though that breakfast shouldn’t cost half as much as the room. We want the purple breakfast to be the same good value as the purple room. So, let me know what you think. 

Moving on, very shortly we will be launching the campaign for the real weekend. You can sign up here today if you want. Where it came from is this. Various recent studies, the one I looked at was from the Henley Centre for Forecasting, were making a very interesting point that whilst we’re all getting wealthier it seems that we’re not getting happier and that the price we pay for increased affluence is less quality time to do the things that please us; spending time with family and friends, going off and doing something wacky – just getting a bit of ‘me’ time. 

I don’t think we’re about to go the French route and have a 38 hour working week and 6 week holidays every year but maybe we need to become a little bit more American. They’re really good at taking a day here, two days there to extend weekends and public holidays into longer breaks without impacting overly on their holiday entitlement. Our contribution to that is to redefine the weekend. Who says it has to be Saturday and Sunday? The shops are all open on both, pubs have all day hours now. We think the weekend is anytime between Thursday and Monday and we’ll be offering weekend rates on all four nights for any length of stay of two nights or more. So call in ‘well’ and take a spontaneous bit of ‘you’ time this weekend (see February blog for concept of calling in ‘well’ to work). If you’ve signed up for the campaign we’ll send you a brochure. If you haven’t, just click here and we’ll still send you a brochure. The credit crunch is a state of mind. Don’t borrow more than you can afford to pay back and it doesn’t exist and don’t get railroaded into working harder and harder and longer and longer hours only to feel less happy at the end of it. You need some chill time and so do I. See you next month.

Maybe it’s because I’ve just listened to the budget speech or maybe I’m just an old cynic but I’m trying to understand what happens when economic times get tougher rather than easier. All the accepted wisdom says businesses start to cut cost, consumers reduce discretionary spending. Keep the customers you’ve got and keep your prices low. Can’t argue with that, it’s what the Americans call motherhood and apple pie. 

So here’s a question for you.

Would you rather see prices kept low, rock bottom, or would you rather see some of the expenditure that you loyally commit to us when you travel on business returned to you for you to use on your leisure travel? We are, in the nicest possible way, indifferent but we can’t do both and we want to do what you, our customers, want and we also want to do what you think is the right thing to do.  Your views, as always, much appreciated.

Join the Purple nation.

Unlike running a manufacturing company or an accounting practice or an airline, in the hotel business everybody’s an expert.

Years ago when I was working for the former Intercontinental Hotel Group we used to have a rule when we travelled that if anybody asked, “Who do you work for?” on a plane, we would always answer, “The International Coco Corporation of Papua New Guinea” on the basis that, the chances of you ever meeting anybody who came from Papua New Guinea was unlikely, and even if you did, to the best of my knowledge there is no such thing as the International Coco Corporation. But, tell them you work for a hotel company and you can guarantee that during the next four hours of the flight, you would be regaled with stories about how they had the worst experience of their life in such and such a place and they got their laundry boiled somewhere else and their wife’s best friend’s cousin’s boyfriend’s niece had a holiday job in the kitchen of your hotel in Barcelona and did you know him? The International Coco Corporation seemed like a better bet.

All of that said, people get pretty emotional about hotels and long may that last. When the Savoy first opened two centuries ago – two centuries, can you believe that? – it’s main claim to fame was that this was London’s first reputable hotel where you could go to sleep in the peace of mind that you weren’t going to get mugged, assaulted or robbed. Hotels in those days were more like hostels. How far we’ve come.

So what’s Purple Hotels all about then? Well, if you’ve come this far you’ve probably read the ads and the website and you know that it’s wrapped up in ‘a lot of what you want and nothing you don’t need’, and they’re ‘low cost hotels with a touch of cool’ or ‘a real hotel for the price of an inn’.

But what’s cool?

Herewith an initial list of cool things that that might help nail this deeply philosophical question.

Cool things:

• Champagne for two in McDonalds with your Egg McMuffins for breakfast.
• Ladies wearing men’s shirts with double cuffs and cuff links
• Black linen suit, white open-necked shirt, no socks (possibly summers only)
• Small expresso’s, like they were meant to be
• Silver jewellery
• Dancing in restaurants where you’re not supposed to but the music’s just so good…

Our definition of cool is pretty easy. It’s rooms that you’d be happy to live in were they in your home, food that you want to eat rather than have to eat because there’s no choice, music that makes you feel good, and service with a sense of humour.

What is it about the hotel industry that equates stuffy with service? It doesn’t have to be that way.

On Rooms

Like you, I’ve been staying in hotels for more years than I can remember and like you, I think it’s actually pretty fun. Also like you, I’ve had my pet hates over the years – chief amongst them was, “How do you turn all of the lights off in this room?”

You would go round the room and turn everything off but there was always one light that defied being turned off. You tried every switch available at the bedside, and it still wouldn’t go. So you got up, traipsed round the room, flicked every other switch and finally, you got the right combination of switches that turned all of the lights off by which point of course you couldn’t find your way back to the bed without stubbing your toe.

Other hotel hates included playing the, “How do you find where they’ve hidden the laundry bag game?” I’m thinking, ‘why can’t they all put it in the same place?’

Pet hates? Pet likes? Things that drive you crazy? Post here

On Restaurants and Bars

There’s a phrase used in the hotel world called “Food and Beverage”. It’s a department, like rooms is a department. To me it’s got all the passion of big pants, or pullies that your Great Aunt knitted for you when you were a kid. It just conveys a passionless feel about something that actually is very sensuous. Food and drink should always be a pleasurable experience and that means it’s got to be made with care and even a little bit of love.

In the chef-obsessed world in which we live, let me kill a few myths and lay down a few home truths as I see them.

In hotels like Purple, where we’re limited service, low-cost; we don’t have chefs; we have cooks. Chefs are the Sergeant Majors of the hotel world. They make a lot of noise, bully bunches of renegade people into doing what they want, all for a good cause, and it has to be said, have a fairly inflated view of their own self-importance.

Cooks on the other hand, are the infantry commanders, they just get things done. We are fortunate in this country that we have such a well-developed and reliable food chain that it’s possible for hotels like ours to have a lot of preparation work done upstream so that cooks in the restaurant can concentrate on the finishing and assembly of dishes rather than preparation from scratch, and as a consequence, we deliver really good food at pretty keen prices.

Like just about everyone else, we are concerned with nutritional value, food miles and provenance, but if you think that this has become a bit ‘faddy’, I have to say I wouldn’t disagree. Having a label on a steak that points out that this steak came from a bull called Eric who lived in a field by the river on a farm with a Hereford postcode is probably more information than you can usefully deal with.

Menus are getting lighter and smaller as we change our eating habits away from the traditional three meals to more of a grazing mentality. The one meal that is not for grazing, in my view, is breakfast. It’s got to be wholesome and it’s got to be hearty.

Most of us don’t have a full breakfast at home because the work week gets in the way so enjoy the hotel experience and have a proper breakfast.

We’re getting rid of the black pudding and house brick, hash brown potatoes throughout Purple and we’re putting in a really good buffet. Tasty drinks, fresh fruit, yoghurts, charcuterie and at least two different types of tortilla (Spanish omelettes if you prefer) and Lavazza coffee everywhere.

(Click here to download the menu).

What we’re setting out to do at Purple is to build a really good business where customers and staff alike have fun whilst they go about their business.

Finishing where I started, everyone in the hotel business is an expert, and that includes you. You have plenty of opportunities in the how did we do cards to tell us, well, how we did. What I hope this little rant will do is give you an opportunity to share your ideas, vent your frustrations, float some thoughts, as wacky as you want, and join the Purple nation.

This blog will be updated monthly and I look forward to talking with you on a regular basis and, I hope, seeing you at one of the 11 Purple hotels across the UK very soon.