The end of November and we were in a hotel, a little north of London. I had booked the room online, after a fairly hurried web search (grandchildren don't arrive to a timetable). With few hotels in the area, the choice was limited.
The hotel's website looked good: clean design, good images, and not too much guff. What I didn't do, but will in future, is look at what people said about their experiences of staying there. I did that the following day. A little too late.
What we found, within a short time of arriving, was a gap between what the website promised ("gracious country living"), and what the hotel delivered ("old, and tired, and dirty") - the language is my wife's. To some extent, there is always going to be this risk. I have learnt, over the years, to treat hotel websites with a degree of caution (a passing acquaintance with the potential deceit of marketing is useful) but what really got me this time was all about price and value.
The hotel wasn't cheap. Perhaps not quite Central London rates, but not far off - and had they delivered on the website promise, we would have felt we had had value. As it was, we felt ripped off. It is a hotel we won't be going to again, and even if we haven't posted any comment on TripAdvisor, we have told a lot of people about it.
And it made me think about how law firms and their clients look at value and price - and why when I talk with clients in the course of client feedback interviews, what they want to talk about when we talk about fees is not price but is value. For when clients are making decisions about their lawyers, and whether they are going to instruct them, or instruct them again, what the client will look at is value. And yet many lawyers are not capable of articulating what value they deliver, and, worse, many still make assumptions about what their clients value - rather than asking them.
