No Way To Make A Living is a sociological space about work, generating discussion and exchange on what work, paid or unpaid, is like in today’s world

I was stay­ing in a B&B last night and found myself hav­ing break­fast this morn­ing with a Hotel Inspector. He didn’t quite have the style of Alex Polizzi, pic­tured above (of the cur­rent Chan­nel Five Hotel Inspector series) but it was still the most inter­est­ing early morn­ing con­ver­sa­tion I’ve had this week. I’m not sure which of the vari­ous organ­isa­tions that bestow stars he works for but it prob­ably doesn’t make much dif­fer­ence. So, dur­ing an espe­cially well-presented break­fast, I asked: What exactly does a real life hotel inspector do?

To start with, he explained that he spends most of the week away from home. The glam­our of his work­ing life is already dimin­ished in my mind. Some estab­lish­ments, those with lower rat­ings, can be checked out in the space of a day-visit, he tells me, whereas oth­ers, hotels or B&Bs with high rat­ings, require an overnight stay. ‘There are a lot of ser­vices to sample in some places’, he com­ments — and lots of hid­den spaces to invest­ig­ate, it turns out. One visit last week led to the dere­gis­ter­ing of an estab­lish­ment after he moved the bed away from the wall and exposed ‘an inch of dust’. The appeal of his work has now com­pletely gone for me. So I’m sur­prised to learn from the How to become a AAA hotel inspector webpage , that it ‘is a much sought-after job, with a lim­ited num­ber of openings’.

Maybe it’s to do with all the free din­ners. I won­der though how it feels to eat in order to eval­u­ate. Do you have to choose things you might not oth­er­wise want? He is obliged to order room ser­vice, try out res­taur­ants, and sit in bars. Not for the leis­ure we would nor­mally asso­ci­ate with con­sump­tion in these places but to scru­tin­ize the menu, and the man­ner and mood of wait­ing staff. His own exper­i­ence in cater­ing, from waiter to chef, goes a long way in help­ing him to judge what’s on his plate, and how it’s brought to him. Yet his cur­rent job has taken him to the other side of the bar or table. This places him in the curi­ous pos­i­tion of know­ing the trades he is assess­ing whilst hav­ing to act like a con­sumer in doing so.

Even when he retires to his room, puts on his pyja­mas, and gets into bed after what might have been a long, hard day, his work is far from over. Is the mat­tress firm? Is it even across the bed? Do the springs squeak if he moves around a lot? Can you hear the people in the room next door? Rest­ful, it isn’t.

As I fin­ish my cof­fee, I ask him what he does for a hol­i­day. I don’t sup­pose you want to stay in a fancy hotel? I say. ‘Not really’, he replies ‘I quite like self-catering.’