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Guest Pass
Sometimes visitors know more about your city than you do
By STAN STALNAKER
November 5, 1999
Web posted at 7:30 p.m. Hong Kong time, 7:30 a.m. EDT
Never try moving apartments and having houseguests over in the same week. For most people, this is a no-brainer. But it can happen, just as your diary fills with astonishing speed, your travel schedule tightens and you feel like you're all set to move into your new Michael Graves-designed condo. At that point a friend will invariably call to announce his or her imminent arrival.
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In retrospect, sending the much-anticipated guest to a posh hotel may have been the best option. There they can experience an Asian virtue that remains unmatched in any other region: hospitality. It's everywhere: be it during a layover in Hong Kong, on the beach in Bali or at yet another tech conference in Singapore.
Everybody, and we mean everybody, complains how poorly the service in other world hubs (New York, L.A., London, Paris...) compares with the genteel civilities and warm welcome of the funny-hat, faux-colonial hotel staff here. Asia spoils you by providing essential services that are an extravagant irritation in places like North America. Here people understand the importance of travel transistors and PowerPoint presentations that must be printed in four minutes. Sushi at 5 a.m.? Sure: because you've just come from New York and that Snickers in the fridge just won't do.
But sending this particular guest to a hotel didn't happen. We couldn't bear the thought of turning someone away, even though the guestroom was filled with boxes of dinnerware and books. After all, friends who stay in a hotel will end up hemorrhaging their shopping budgets on room service.
And it's shopping where a good houseguest can avoid becoming a nuisance. Not because they come bearing gifts, but because they teach the time-strapped professional where to find your city's new funky-cool street markets--handy information when you have four hours to do Christmas shopping for people scattered across seven time zones, and Gucci is sold out of picture frames.
This, unfortunately, is the reality of Asia's growing mobile culture: visitors know more than you do, because you just live there and they read Lonely Planet. A really good houseguest will even offer to help in some small way, like sticking around at home so the repairman can come to fix that leaky faucet which has been bugging you since January.
Which all leads to one final, scary conclusion. The humble houseguest is starting to "add value." Next they'll be charging US! In a world turned upside down by Amazon.com, taxpayer-funded cyberports and negative profitability, this backward trend must, somehow, some way, be linked to the Internet. We just can't figure out how.
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