The Forte Hotel in Florence
We once stayed at the Forte Hotel in Florence. A great hotel in every way: service, position and overall quality were all excellent and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it. As usual I had taken a book to read, as I recall it was on the Medici family who ruled Florence for many generations – now they really knew how to run a business!
Anyhow, I started to read it on the first night but was very tired and only managed a few pages before folding over the corner of the page (hope my mother never reads this – shame on me) to mark my position.
We spent the next day trudging round the sights of that most beautiful and majestic city before returning to the hotel thoroughly exhausted. When we entered the room the maid had clearly been in and the place was perfect but something struck me as odd about my book. Upon closer inspection I noticed that she had folded the page back and instead marked my position with a beautiful leather Forte Hotels book mark.
A small thing really but what message does it convey about Forte Hotels?: thoughtful, observant, proactive, attentive, well trained and customer focused. Powerful stuff when you come to think about it.
Sometimes the small things can communicate much more about you and your organisation than the big things and in many cases, just like the book mark, at a negligible cost.
