I’m Brett Sterenson with Hotel Lobbyists. Here are some examples of people who I’m not. I’m not Ms. Rashkundar with the American Podiatry Association. I’m not Mr. Rafferty with the Traitheletes Society. I’m not Ms. McMahon with NASA. And I’m also not Mr. Cohn with the National Hemophiliacs Foundation. But if you read some of the more recent proposals that were sent to me by esteemed hotels, you might think I had a number of different personas.
The truth is, technological efficiencies can sometimes whittle away the personalized details that once came with the, dare-I-say, handwritten proposal. I’m all for technological advances too – nary a day goes by I don’t stare at my phone when it’s ringing and silently scream, “Why won’t they just email me?”
But with email and other electronic communication mediums, comes the ever dreaded form proposal. And when hotels use a form proposal by writing over it rather than using a database to populate the many fields, they are prone to forget that ever disguised Ms. Rashkundar that’s now been indelibly tied to their closing paragraph where it used to say something a bit more cryptic like [Title. Last_Name$].
The difficulty is that once I’m called Mr. Rafferty and not Mr. Sterenson, I immediately jump to the conclusion that this is a hotel where details can be missed. Not where a miss is a guarantee, but where some t’s may go uncrossed or worse, where some t’s may go dotted.