luxury webblog

In the latest twist on hotel service, some guests are better than others.

While luxury resorts have always offered pricey room options like a presidential suite tiffany and co, service outside the room has generally been the same. Now some resorts are rolling out fancier service tiers that come with benefits blatantly visible to other guests, from private pools and beach areas in the middle of the grounds to guaranteed spots at crowded restaurants. Elite guests — who pay an additional $40 to $900 or more per night — also get nicer rooms and full access to the main resort. To distinguish them from the regular guests, many of whom are paying hefty rates of $400 to $1,000 a night, they sometimes get special bracelets or towels.

At eight all-inclusive Paradisus Resorts in Mexico and the Caribbean, higher-tier guests get extras like air-conditioned restaurants and private beach and pool areas for about $100 more daily per person. In February, the Phoenician in Scottsdale, Ariz., reopened its 60-room Canyon Building, just off the main building, as an “exclusive resort-within-a-resort.” The $75 to $380 nightly premium includes access to a separate pool and guaranteed dinner reservations and tee times. At the two-year-old Wynn Las Vegas, Tower Suites guests have the sole use of two pools overlooking the main pool and more food options than down below.

Jacob and Susan Rooksby got a peek at the subtle class distinctions during their January honeymoon at the Paradisus Playa Conchal in Costa Rica, where they paid $800 a night for a junior suite. When they first visited the resort’s main pool, dozens of sunbathers clogged the chairs, a volleyball game was under way in the water and a Latin-style band played American hits by the bar. Two days later, they stumbled on a quieter pool, where an attendant was circling with cold towels among the 14 or so guests. But as soon as the couple set down their towels, the attendant asked them to leave. “He said, ‘Oh. I’m sorry but this pool is only for Royal Service guests,’” says Mr. Rooksby, a 25-year- old law student at the University of Virginia. “You don’t expect, for that kind of money, to be treated like a second-class citizen.”

The hotels are taking a cue from the success of club floors, which first appeared a few decades ago on silver cufflinks the top floors of urban hotels and were geared at business travelers. The floors generally offered the same quality rooms as the rest of the hotel but included extras like a faster check-in, fancier bathroom amenities and lounges with complimentary food. Fairmont Hotels & Resorts offers “Gold floors” at 22 properties. Those rooms, which cost about $50 to $100 more a night, have occupancy rates an average nine to 10 percentage points higher than rooms on other floors.

Hotels are also responding to higher demand, thanks to the strong economy, the unprecedented number of U.S. millionaires and the growing number of retiring baby boomers. Average luxury room rates rose about 9% in 2006 over the year before, according to Smith Travel Research. Adding more expensive enclaves allows hotels to increase profits without having to build a whole new luxury property, which takes an average of five years. “They are observing that even at the upper levels, you can dissect the guests even more,” says Rogerio Basso, senior manager with Ernst & Young’s Hospitality Advisory Group. He expects more hotels to pick up the concept over the next five years.

But as resorts serve two tiers of guests on one site — akin to throwing aside the curtain between coach and first class — some regular guests are resisting the treatment. They’re crashing the pools, posing as the elite and leaving their low-rank signifiers behind.

Barbara Watters, who paid about $500 a night for an ocean-view room at the El Dorado Royale on the Riviera Maya in Mexico last month, was constantly reminded of her lesser standing during her two-night stay. Guests in the resort’s Casita suites, which cost about 50% more, have private pools, exclusive use of certain beds on the beach and restaurant reservation priority. For identification, Casita guests get beige-striped towels, while regular guests have green-striped towels.

One day, Ms. Watters — who says she could never get dinner reservations before 8:30 p.m., despite asking for 5:30 or 6 — and her boyfriend left their towels in their rooms and walked into the nicer pool. After swimming, they “dried off in the sun,” says the 40-year- old executive secretary from Grand Rapids, Mich. “If you were staying in a Casita, you were treated like royalty. If you weren’t in a Casita, you didn’t count.”

Pamela Johnston, a spokeswoman for El Dorado Royale, says, “All of our guests are important to us and we silver money clips aim to exceed all of their expectations.”

At the El Conquistador Resort in Puerto Rico, Claudine Caro infiltrated the infinity pool during her four-night stay last August. The pool is meant for use by guests of Las Casitas Village, a small complex adjacent to the main building. (There, current peak-season room rates start at $269 a night — about $40 more than a room in the main resort. One-bedrooms start at $485.) Ms. Caro, a 33-year-old in South Brunswick, N.J., who develops educational courses for a pharmaceutical company, and her cousin visited the pool twice around dinnertime, when there weren’t any attendants around. “We walked in like we owned the place,” she says.

Hotels are trying to enforce the boundaries. “It is an issue,” says Stan Soroka, managing director of El Conquistador and Las Casitas Village. The hotel has tried measures to keep the uninvited out of the Las Casitas infinity pool, like asking people for their key or room number every hour and a half. That didn’t go over too well. “A lot of people would say, ‘I didn’t bring my key and I don’t want to answer those questions,’” he says. Mr. Soroka expects to launch another solution later this spring: a gate around the pool with a key-swipe system. He’s not sure it will be fail-safe, though. “It’s going to be a very short gate,” he says — and people could jump over it.

“I think if you are going to have a resort, everybody should be treated equally,” says Sandra Jarvis, a 36-year-old commercial real- estate broker from Indianapolis who went with her boyfriend to the Paradisus Riviera Cancun last October. After she was asked to leave the less-crowded Royal Service pool she had walked into one afternoon, Ms. Jarvis went to the front desk to complain and received an explanation of the upper-tier perks. She returned to the main pool, still unsatisfied. “We have our own private plane and they are telling me to leave the pool?” she says. Later that day, she ripped off her white standard-guest bracelet and carried it in her pocket for the rest of the trip.

Her boyfriend, lawyer Tom Bedsole, 42, says he didn’t book Royal Service because when he visited the Web site, he thought the hotel was touting service given to all guests. “I didn’t realize the royals were a separate class,” he says.

While many acknowledge it’s a balancing act, hotels say they do try to keep everyone happy. Andre Gerondeau, an silver pendants executive vice president for Sol Melia Hotels & Resorts, which owns the Paradisus Resorts, says Royal Service pool attendants wouldn’t ask regular guests to leave unless the pool was full, and that Royal Service areas are more set apart at larger properties. Guests can upgrade if space is available.

In late 2005, the Puntacana Resort & Club in the Dominican Republic added the 35-suite Tortuga Bay hotel to its property, between its existing 355-room hotel and the golf course. Guests there get guaranteed golf carts for roaming the property, mobile phones for calling a personal concierge, and restaurant and golf reservation priority. Rooms currently start at $590 for a double-occupancy suite, more than twice the entry-level room rate at the bigger resort. “You are paying more so you are supposed to be getting more,” says spokeswoman Paola Rainieri de Diaz. She adds that hotel staff will ask “refined” customers — for example, those who arrive on a private plane or who have an American Express black card — or those who look like they have been to the Caribbean if they want to upgrade at check- in.

The idea that others might be more important can spark a little vacation insecurity. During her weeklong visit to the 49-room Anse Chastanet Resort on St. Lucia last fall, at $475 a night, Rosaria Davies could see the five-month-old Jade Mountain extension every time she went for a swim on the beach. Guests there get their own restaurant, spa and pools, plus access to the main resort; nightly rates this season start at $1,150. “It looked great from afar,” says the 37-year-old from London. When she and her husband had to wait an hour between the appetizers and main course at dinner one night, they wondered if Jade Mountain guests were being served more quickly. During the trip, the couple joked, “Are we chopped liver?” The hotel says it treats all of its guests equally.

Service distinctions are cropping up in other vacation areas, including amusement parks and cruises. On Norwegian Cruise Line’s new Norwegian Pearl, guests staying in one of the 10 courtyard villas or two deluxe owner’s suites get perks like a private courtyard with pool, hot tub and sundeck.

At hotels, guests who can swing the premium say they’re just trying to maximize their vacation. Larry Hughes and his wife, Susan, opted for the Phoenician’s new Canyon Suites earlier this month, at about $1,800 a night for six nights, for some extra privacy. “I am willing to pay more because essentially we are going there to relax,” says the 60-year-old staffing company franchise owner from Magnolia, Texas.