Tag: sri lanka

Sri Lanka diaries: Hotel of the tour

The “hotel of the tour” award for my just-completed vacation in Sri Lanka goes to Pigeon Island Beach Resort in Trincomalee. Now, it is not that they had the best rooms. It is not that the rooms were the best maintained. It is not that the service there trumped the service at every other hotel that I stayed in. It was simply that they seemed to have given the most thought to the hotel design.

At first look I wasn’t particularly impressed with the hotel. Now, it is a highly rated hotel going by TripAdvisor, because of which we had booked it, but the first impressions weren’t great. The reception area was small – just one table, staffed with people not in any uniform (it’s a beach resort – so I should’ve figured that the T-shirts they were wearing was actually uniform!). The hotel was rather small and narrow, with access to a narrow sliver of the beach. The rooms were big, but the loo seemed uncomfortable, with the way the pot was wedged next to the shower cubicle. And the air conditioning never seemed to cool the room enough!

It was after a trip to the beach later in the afternoon that I figured out the value in the hotel design. Now, when you go to the beach, you can expect to get all dirty and muddy. So resorts usually have a shower installed on the way back from the beach to the rooms. This was there. What really impressed me, though, was the tap in the garden right in front of my room! Now, even after showering on the way back to the room, my feet and slippers had got all dirty and muddy. It would have been a mess to clean up the room had I walked in with my muddy feet. So this tap meant that I could wash my feet once again before stepping into the room, thus saving the hotel the trouble of cleaning all those rooms whose occupants had taken care to wash their feet!

Then there were the clothes hangers outside each room. Now, you don’t expect everyone who go to the beach to be wearing swimsuits, and that means a lot of wet clothes. People usually fill up the bathroom with these wet clothes and it can get uncomfortable! Again, it was great thought to put these clothes hangers so that you needn’t fill up your bathroom with the wet clothes! It was another matter that they didn’t have enough of those, and we had to dry our clothes on a chair outside the room!

The following night we stayed at Hotel Earl’s Regent in Kandy, a new hotel inaugurated by “His Excellency President” Mahinda Rajapakse in January this year. It is a hotel which showed a lot of promise, and we were even upgraded to rooms with Jacuzzis. But the detail in design was missing.

For example, at one end of the bathroom was the Jacuzzi and at the other end the shower cubicle. Now, the towel rack was right above the Jacuzzi, and there were no towel hangers on the doors of the shower cubicle. This meant that once you got out of the shower, you had to get all the way across the bathroom to pick up your towel, thus wetting it in its entirety! Then, despite having bathing spaces at either end of the bathroom, there was only one foot mat. Again, this meant that if you failed to move it to your side of the bathroom when you stepped in, the bathroom was again liable to get dirty!

It is amazing how much people are willing to invest in hotels, without getting these small details that can delight a customer right!

Then there was the issue of the plug points. Sri Lanka uses Indian plug points, which meant that we hadn’t bothered to take adapters along. Both in Earl’s Regent and in Cinnamon Grand in Colombo (a five star hotel), most of the plug points turned out to be British-style! Now, you might get a lot of your guests from Britain and it might make sense to have those plug points, but it is surprising that only one point in each room can take Sri Lankan plugs! Now, when each of you has a phone, and then you have an iPad, all of which need charging, it becomes real hard to manage with such plugs!

I don’t know what it is about five star hotels that they refuse to offer health faucets! Every hotel on tour offered them except Cinnamon Grand (the most expensive), where we were forced to use toilet paper. Now, you might get some Western guests who don’t know how to use health faucets, but having them in the room does no harm, while providing great value to Asian and Middle Eastern guests! On a similar note, the Palm Garden Village Hotel in Anuradhapura (a massive forested resort) didn’t offer a health faucet but instead had a separate arse-washing pot. It was again inconvenient and ineffective design, when a simple health faucet would have done the trick with less real estate wasted! And if they had space for a separate arse-washing pots, they might have as well put Sochi-style adjacent pots – it was after all a romantic hotel, with adjacent showers, etc!

Cinnamon Grand also had the worst showers. They had two taps – one for adjusting the level of the hot water, and one for the cold water, and they were the only two controls you had to adjust both the temperature and the pressure of the flow. So if you finally (after a lot of trial and error) got control over the temperature, and wanted to increase the pressure, you had the unenviable task of adjusting two taps simultaneously! Or if you wanted to stop the shower to soap yourself, you had to again do the trial and error thing of finding the right temperature!

The shower at my home has three controls – one tap each for hot and cold water, and another to adjust the overall pressure of the shower. This third tap can be used to adjust intensity after the first two have been used to adjust temperature! The other hotels on tour offered a single lever – right-left movement adjusted the temperature while up-down movement adjusted the pressure! Worked beautifully. Maybe there is a theorem somewhere that the best shower controls have an odd number of levers!

Fixed Price

The problem with a lot of touristy places is that there are no fixed prices. While this means that vendors can practice effective revenue management, it also means that it is easier for them to cartelize and take the tourists for a collective ride.

I realized this during my recent trip to Sri Lanka where you need to find someone you trust to get “access” to some place. But then it is most likely that any possible intermediary is more loyal to the service provider (due to regular contact etc) than to the tourist. So the tourist ends up being screwed no matter what.

Later that night we were to figure that even the bargained prices that we paid at the wood factory were heavily inflated, and things were available for a fourth of that price (!!) at the souvenir shop attached to our hotel in Nuwara Eliya. Where else in the world do you see prices in hotel souvenir shops being significantly lower than close to the source?

So this agent business continued through the trip. We wanted to go river rafting, so we (once again) trusted our driver to find us a nice service provider. The following day we wanted to go on a boat ride up the Bentota river, and we had the (unenviable) choice of our hotel and the driver (yet again) to serve as intermediary.

What makes matters worse is that if you go without an intermediary prices are likely to be even higher. It’s as illiquid a market as you can find. But whichever intermediary you choose you are likely to end up paying much above market values. It’s not often that you find (supposedly) altruistic intermediaries such as the Gift Shop at the Grand Hotel in Nuwara Eliya.

So I wonder what drives a market from this kind of state to one where prices are fixed, and there are menus (interestingly in Sri Lanka you don’t find menus in many places. you are charged an arbitrary sum). It is unlikely to be regulation, since smart players are always a step ahead of the regulators. It has to be some market characteristic that tips the market in favour of transparency and efficiency. I’m trying to figure out what it is.

(this suddenly reminds me of a recent attempt by an investment bank to try create a private market for shares in a private technology company. Clearly the market in shares has “tipped” in favour of transparency, for the attempt hasn’t been as successful as initially imagined)

Rafa and the Ranatunga Principle

Today seems to be a massive theory session. In the morning, I introduced you to the Mata Amrita Index. Now, as I write this watching the third set of (ok it’s the third set now – when I’m starting to write. for all you know, by the time I finish this, the match might be over) the Australian Open, I think it is a good time for me to introduce to you the Ranatunga Principle of energy management.

The Ranatunga principle states that:

When you don’t need to run, walk.

Yes, it is that simple. And if played an instrumental part in Sri Lanka’s victory in the 1996 Cricket world cup. Arjuna Ranatunga, the captain, was a massive guy. Yet, he was an excellent finisher, converting the ones into twos, and the twos into threes, running them hard, making everyone wonder where he managed to get so much energy and stamina from. The key to his performance was what this terriffic energy management.

He knew that the effort involved in each run wasn’t the same. There were a few that were “obvious singles” or “obvious twos” and he correctly realized that there was no point in running them faster than was necessary. And he simply walked them, saving up his precious energy and stamina for the runs that required more energy. In fact, if you recollect, the defining picture of Ranatunga in the 1996 world cup was his nudging a ball to third man and lazily walking a single.

Similarly, in tennis, due to the unique game-set-match scoring system, not all points are of the same value. Some points are more equal than others. For example, it doesnt’ matter if you lose a game at love, or if you lose it after making 30. However, certain points (break points, especially) can make a tremendous difference to the game, and it is important that you win those.

Tennis, especially of the non-grass court variety, is a highly energy-consuming game. We saw on Friday the Nadal-Verdasco game being played for almost five hours. The final also promises to go on for a similar length of time. Even on grass, as we saw in the last Wimbledon, tennis can become an endurance game. To remind you, Rafa Nadal beat Roger Federer in the final back then, taking the fifth set 9-7 (Wimbledon has no tie-breakers in the last set). It was his superior energy-management and stamina-management that saw him through that day.

It had been a long time since I had seen Rafa play, and looking at him play today, it is clear that he has understood the Ranatunga principle well. In fact, he seems to be an excellent exponent of the same. A while back, Federer was leading 40-0, and Rafa just gave up and allowed Federer to take the game, choosing to preserve his energies for more important point. I’m not saying that Rafa has been completely giving up. What I’m saying is that he seems to be doing some kind of a “value analysis” for each point, and then deciding how much energy he is willing to spend on it.

I don’t know if he is a math stud, but you don’t need to be one in order to do simple Ranatunga analysis. You can get a computer to work out the relative values of points for you depending upon the match score, and broadly remember that when you are playing. And once you have done that a few times, you will automatically be able to figure out how much effort to put into each point (remember that you don’t need to know complicated projectile physics in order to catch a ball).

A lot of managers, especially fighters, don’t like the Ranatunga principle. Their management philosophy is that you always need to be f resh, and be prepared, and if you don’t dive on a regular basis, you won’t be able to dive when you actually need to. However, the Ranatunga reply to this is that as long as you know how to dive, and have general practice in diving, you will instinctively dive when you need to, and you should make sure that you have enough energy to dive.

Extending the analogy to work, there are some managers who like to push their subordinates to meet deadlines even when it isn’t important in the larger scheme of things. Their argument here is that their subordinates should have enough experience in diving so that they can use it when they need it. The Ranatunga response to that is for the subordinate to be smart, and to see the larger picture, and to call the manager’s bluff about the criticality of the project whenever it turns out to be not critical.

Ok, so Rafa has won the third set and leads the match 2 sets to 1. If this ends up being a pure endurance 5-setter, I would put my money on Rafa. He seems to be showing superior implementation of the Ranatunga principle.