What is the role of the guides?
The AA, self-confessedly conservative and self-evidently wary of controversy, is unwilling to enter into a public debate about its recent internal difficulties. So keen to suppress discussion is the organisation that its final settlement with its former restaurant guide editor, Liz Carter, included a gagging clause that forbids her from talking about the events that led to her departure (Caterer, 6 July, page 5). Another departed inspector, Linda Vijeh, has also signed a confidentiality clause. Both received pay-offs as part of their final settlement with the organisation.
Buyout failed
Although, in one sense, the reason for the departure of Carter, Vijeh and fellow-inspector Glyn Williams is an open secret - they were part of a failed management buyout effort - the reasons for that buyout attempt are less well known. But they go right to the heart of the role of modern guidebooks.
Who are restaurant and hotel guides for? The question is not as straightforward as it might first appear. Most guides are at least as concerned to cultivate the goodwill of the hotels and restaurants they are judging as they are to satisfy the needs of potential guests and diners buying the guidebooks.
There are persuasive financial reasons for this. Many of the guides get part of their financing from those they are assessing. Hoteliers are only too aware, for example, that while the AA might not charge for inclusion in its hotel guide, it does charge for inspections. The amounts are not huge, but a top hotel can pay nearly £1,000 for an inspection. In other words, you can't buy a write-up, but you can't have one unless you are prepared to pay for an inspection.
There is nothing necessarily wrong with these charges - the finance has to come from somewhere - but they do raise a number of issues. One is that taking money from those you are supposed to be judging contains at least the potential for compromising independence.
"It can be difficult to produce a guide that tells the truth and satisfies the people that are going into it," observed one of the buyout team.
Another effect of taking money for inspections is that it increases the pressure for the guides to give something back to those that are paying. What they usually give is advice on how the hotels or restaurants might get better.
How far the AA should be a consultant to hotels and restaurants is one of the questions that was at the core of the aborted buyout in April. Put simply, the former inspectors believed they could make more money for the AA by increasing the amount of consultancy work it did.
They planned to do this by separating the inspecting and consultancy roles of the AA, using different staff for each. The theory was that they could simultaneously increase income - through the consultancy - and independence by strictly separating the two operations.
Insiders at the AA point out that some separation already exists, at least in the sense that the hotel services section of the organisation, which employs the inspectors, is self-financing, while the guidebooks make money through copy sales. The guidebooks make use of the inspectors' information, but are regarded as a separate part of the business.
Furthermore, the AA's position is not that increasing consultancy is necessarily a bad idea, but that the management buyout effort was conducted in the wrong way. It was, argue insiders, harmful to staff morale and could have involved confidential AA information passing to third parties. That is why those involved were suspended.
For the rebel inspectors the question is now less relevant that it was. Carter, Vijeh and Williams are all involved with the consultancy, Service Matters, Vijeh as managing director. They are all putting their futures where their opinions are.
But for the AA - and other guides - the issues raised by the affair are unlikely to go away. Confidentiality clauses or not, they are going to have to address the question of what hotel and restaurant guides should be providing in the 21st century, both for their readers and for those they report on.
Source: Caterer & Hotelkeeper magazine, 13-19 July 2000
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