British hotels, never the best in the world, are suffering
under a double handicap which is likely to give overseas visitors a pretty poor opinion of them. About the effect of the basic petrol ban on most country and seaside hotels I need say little ; everything neces- sary has been said about that already. But the new conditions im- posed by the Catering Trades Agreement are much more serious. Two instances happen to have come my way last week-end. In one case a trade union official has been visiting a village inn with three or four bedrooms and insisting on restrictions in the matter of service which make the place practically unworkable. The other case is of a well-known and well-patronised hotel at a well-known seaside resort. There the eight-hour day proviso has again knocked normal arrangements endways—all at the expense of the comfort of the guests. Breakfast has to be compressed within a fixed hour, lunch within a fixed three-quarter hour, and so on. A resident guest who came in from a walk at 5.5 and asked for tea got none, because under the new arrangements tea ends at 5. I know, of course, that many hotel servants were overworked in the past, but their services usually won appreciation and good tips from the guests. Tips are likely in the future to be smaller and grudging. What is bad for the tourist traffic means less employment for the servants. * *
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