30 July 2015
Getting our desserts
by Chin Chin
I don’t know how the directors of Booking.com spend their holidays, but they must be rather tedious if the approach taken by their website is anything to go by. A couple of years ago I decided to stay at Montreuil–sur-Mer for the first night of a touring holiday in France. That doesn’t mean at just any hotel in Montreuil, but rather at the Château, a watering-hole as important to the sophisticated modern traveller as was Cyprus to the better class of crusader. I shall say no more about the Chateaux (it is already quite popular enough as it is) but I duly booked my room on the booking.com website and subsequently enjoyed my stay.
That, you might think, was the end of the matter; but if you think that, you are wrong. Ever since then I have received regular emails announcing “Last-minute deals at Montreuil-sur-Mer”, presumably on the slightly odd assumption that my idea of going on holiday is to go somewhere I’ve been before, possibly using a different hotel. There may be people who like to holiday in that way, but I doubt that there are many. Surely it would be more logical to send me details of resorts similar to Montreuil which I might not have tried – rather like Amazon recommending similar books. They don’t, after all, offer to send you the book you bought before but in a different cover.
Still, the irritation of receiving repeated holiday recommendations pales to nothing when compared with the annoyance of being offered the opportunity to buy luxury goods “because I deserve them”. For one thing, I am never offered the goods free of charge, which would be the logical response to a true case of “deserving”. For another, how does the internet know whether I deserve them or not? Has the monitoring of electronic traffic gone further than I thought, so that there is now a committee, staffed perhaps by the Archbishop of Canterbury and one or two others drawn from the great and the good, whose role is to determine who is deserving and who is not? “Yes”, they might say, “that is the third email he has sent to his mother this week. Give him two ‘deserving points’ and send him that message about our linen sheets offer”. Then I suppose there must be those who have only one point and not two. “No, linen sheets are too good for him,” intones the Archbishop, “but I suppose brushed nylon ones would not be inappropriate.”
That is certainly one possibility. The other, however, is that the offers are sent out indiscriminately with no monitoring at all. “You owe yourself a tasteful woollen tea cosy, Mr Putin”. “Your Majesty deserves a nice set of plastic place mats to set off all that silver and gold”. “You deserve the opportunity to buy a case of Algerian wine at French prices, Dutch cigars priced as if they came from Cuba, a tasteful pair of Austrian shorts or almost anything whose price is based on its brand.”
Actually, it isn’t the implication that you are stupid enough to believe that your good deeds have earned you the chance to buy overpriced rubbish which is so offensive, but the impertinent suggestion that the marketing people can classify your worth. Nobody likes to be judged, and in one of his Father Brown stories Chesterton uses the exercise of character judgement as a motive for murder.
Unfortunately, it is impractical to identify the advertising man responsible for the “you deserve it” line, so murder is out of the question. Let’s just say that as fallible human beings living in Britain, most of us don’t really deserve as much as we already get. Perhaps then the statement that we deserve to buy a particular product sends a message about that product and its pricing which is different from that intended by the advertisers.
For myself, I can only say that I hope never to get my deserts; desserts, however, in a restaurant like that of the Château of Montreuil, are quite a different matter.
