Let's Compare Dave's $5,000/NIGHT Hotel Room In Tampa To The Most Expensive Hotel Room I've Stayed In
Last night, Dave posted a video decrying the mediocrity of his Tampa Edition Hotel suite. The room apparently ran him $5,000/night. In Tampa. Here's the video:
The most expensive hotel I've ever stayed at in my life was this place in Rwanda, on our honeymoon. The place was mind-blowing. So outrageously over the top in every single way. Service, touches, landscaping, food, amenities, views, linens, mattress, water pressure… whatever criteria you use to evaluate hotels, this place knocked every rubric out of the park.
We were there for just three nights and I used acres of credit card points and the bulk of our wedding gifts to finance the trip. And still, it was less expensive than Dave's hotel in Tampa.
Let's compare our room:
For $5,000/night, Dave's Edition suite has:
-No cool art on the walls
-No outdoor deck
-No outdoor bathtub or shower
-An unreplenished minibar that is NOT complimentary
-No wild silverback mountain gorillas
The list goes on and on. Dave's room looks like an Ikea staging area. Bland and minimalistic to a point of trolling. Surely, Edition, you guys could throw some color in there without offending your clientele? Perhaps a curved piece of furniture? And what about that fucking free-standing television!
So as not to impede the view? Why not throw it in one of those disappearing pop-up draws at the foot of the bed, like in MTV cribs. There must be a better way to have a television in a $5,000/night hotel room. You didn't even hide the wires! For Christ's sake, Edition. We live in a society.
Now, in defense of the the Tampa Edition, to the best of my knowledge there was no horrific genocide in Tampa just 30 years ago. That sort of thing tends to soften the tourism market and can really impact the high-end hotel business.
But I've never agreed with the ol' boss man more than I do about this hotel. Some people will say "oh boo hoo, rich people complaining about first-world problems." Guess what, poors? It's EXACTLY this type of quality management FROM the wealthy that trickles down to you barnacles. We hold the top hotels to a high standard and that forces everyone beneath to keep up to the best of their ability. Maybe the butt-singed carpet at your Red Roof Inn gets an extra pass with the vacuum because some maid saw Dave's video.
It starts at the top. Lead from the tip of the spear. By sending back an overcooked porterhouse at a Michelin-starred steakhouse and posting it on Twitter, the line chefs at TGIFridays see it and check the temperature of their dog meat a bit more attentively. We're all dreamers, after all. If those ex-cons figure to work their way out of the some mall in Syracuse and into a promising James Beard candidate, they need to start that ascendency… today.
It's like seeing videos of Jordan Spieth practicing bunker shots for hours. If the best to do it are disciplined enough to practice the small, pesky minutiae of their game, then who are we mere mortals to cut corners?
If I know Dave as well as I think I do, there is no amount of money that we could ever make to have us ignore such glaring discrepancies between PRICE and VALUE. Most of the time, a higher price tag means a better product. But when that law of nature is violated, and you feel like you're being taken for a sucker who won't check the line items on your receipts? Someone who won't anxiously eye that $200 temporary incidentals charge on your credit card statement and, when it still hasn't disappeared two weeks after checkout, call your credit card company to dispute the charge and retain legal counsel to sue Marriott International?
Any man too rich to have outgrown his own pettiness is a poor man indeed.