Excellence wins. How Four Seasons Minneapolis hits it out of the park.

Against the backdrop of short-term rental fever and the searing trauma of the 2020 riots, the great American hotel endures, offering us a template for American renewal.

As I sit poolside at the gorgeous Four Seasons Minneapolis watching supremely geeky guys courting preposterously comely Nordic princesses, I am struck by the enduring miracle of a professionally run hotel. The Four Seasons is the apex predator of hotel chains. They have clearly studied what is consistently annoying in the competition: gauche, inappropriate-acting bellmen and security; chatty, door-banging cleaning staff; haughty, curt, and dismissive front desk attendants; egregious resort fees; ignorant and unhelpful concierge; a Maoist level of inflexibility; and clueless management who do not know how to honor and reward repeat customers, let alone their own staff.

Perhaps it’s just the inherent intelligence, decency, and humility of most Minnesotans as manifested at a top-tier hotel. But I suspect it’s the signature Four Seasons training, with its impressive paid opportunities for advanced hotel education––from the cleaning team to food and beverage managers. The staff here is the brand. They embody the Four Seasons in their DNA.

All this redounds to an enduring must-have attribute: an across-the-board grasp of excellent service. I pay the extra $200 or more a night at Four Seasons because of that service. I can get the same luxury room at other top-line properties. But the differentiator here is not just the thoughtful quality of the physical infrastructure––from the state-of-the-art pool, spa, and workout room, dining at elegant award-winning Mara, smart-room lighting, and courtesy in-room iPad and phone charger––but the diverse, best-in-show human infrastructure.

Here you will find the force multiplier of service: attitude. A consistently amenable, helpful attitude is key, especially when it comes to special requests. Hotel work is performance art. Minding the smallest detail matters. For example, when you see a guest about to pass before you, you back away. If a guest needs a little extra time for checkout, you don’t send up the security team to yank them out, which happened to me recently at my formerly beloved Hotel Santa Fe. You keep your voice low, you don’t complain in front of guests, you don’t make a scene, you don’t cuss, you work as a quiet dutiful team, but you are not overly cool and detached. You are authentic but appropriate. You memorize guest names and address them formally by name.

The Four Seasons Minneapolis is not perfect. Though the concierge Molly was stellar––securing me an excellent barber at nearby Martin Patrick’s––the modest in-house car cleaning I requested was slipshod and not worth the trouble of getting it done. These details matter as I have regularly instructed management at my favorite hotel in my hometown of Omaha, the fabulous throwback stunner that is Kimpton Cottonwood. As Cottonwood comes to realize they will not be able to hire, let alone retain, the tiny coterie of smart, presentable, service-centric Omaha-area talent without paying much more in salary (which they still need to do), they have wisely looked to recruit eager well-trained talent from abroad. This has made an appreciable difference in quality. I hope one day that Cottonwood, as well as one of my favorite boutique chains, The Archer, can command the respect of the Four Seasons. But it will take a more assiduous focus on getting all the details right and finding staff who deeply desire to make a career in the noble, spiritually rewarding profession of service.

In his seminal work on hotel management, Excellence Wins: A No-Nonsense Guide to Becoming the Best in a World of Compromise, Horst Schulze, former President and COO of the $2 billion Ritz Carlton Hotel Company, stressed the importance of yes. He found through surveys that many guests wanted late checkouts. So, he deployed a no-questions approach to checkout and adjusted staff scheduling accordingly. Schulze understood that the key to any business, especially a high-end business, is repeat customers. To keep them happy, a hotel must grasp that it’s not about the hotel’s needs, but about guests’ needs.

Now imagine if we had a government that thought the same way. One that treated every tax-paying citizen as a valued customer who deserves top-level service without guff, without excuses, and with excellence at every turn. A government that knows that “no” is rarely the answer and that prompt decorous replies to requests should be the norm. A government that grasps the importance of goodwill and uses its enormous leverage to elevate, restore, and heal, instead of intrusively inflicting its ideology, its needs, and its vengeance on the public. Just imagine that for a second, and then you will see not only the opportunity for renewal in the travel and hotel business but in the country writ large.