Butlers have been serving the wealthy and powerful for over a millennium, but hotel butlers are a recent phenomenon. Apart from one or two butlers working in a few luxury hotels around the world since their first appearance in 1865, butlers only showed up in hotels in 1982. Until the publication of Hotel Butlers, The Great Service Differentiators in 2004, there were only isolated job-descriptions. That 2004 publication was written based on a year of experience with training butlers in hotels and built upon the 2001 publication of the third book ever published in 1,000 years for the butler profession, Butlers and Household Managers, 21st Century Professionals. The Hotel Butlers book required a lot of new ground to be covered, a lot of research to be done in the few hotels offering butler service at the time, as private service and hospitality are similar in goals and some duties, but otherwise quite different. In the 15 years since the publication of the Hotel Butlers book, the hospitality markets have changed considerably, guest expectations have changed as younger generations from the West as well as Asia frequent luxury hotels and resorts, and technology has leapt into the forefront. Some resorts do not want to be associated with the stuffy old British butler, but they definitely want the solicitous (caring) and precise service they are famous for, and so they call their butlers Island Hosts, Resort Hosts, Thakurus, Personal Assistants, Lifestyle Architects, etc., all of which are butlers in deed and fact-or to paraphrase Shakespeare, a butler by any other name (meaning that whatever the label, the true value is in what the person actually is and does). Additionally, the experience gained in setting up the International Institute of Modern Butlers in 2004 to train butlers and other staff in 200 4&5* hotels and resorts, as well as cruise ships, has greatly expanded the understanding of the "hospitality butler"-any butling outside a palace or private residence. For the obvious benefits of having a butler in a hotel meant resorts, cruise ships, airlines, and even hospitals started to introduce butler service, too. As a result, the title of the new book has progressed beyond the limited "Hotel Butlers" to "Hospitality Butlers" in order to reflect the new reality. What was written in the original Hotel Butlers book is still 100% applicable, but it needed updating to reflect, for instance, the use of digital communications and media, in place of paper records and radio communications-which used to be cutting edge just 15 years ago. In the same busy 15 years, we and others have created and fine-tuned new services for butlers to deliver in hospitality environments, and the author has had 50 articles published in hospitality journals and media that have helped raise perceptions and standards in the hospitality profession as a whole, as well as highlighting and championing the role of the butler in hospitality. Quite a few of these articles are included in this new edition. This book is thus 50% longer than the original and includes a 30-page glossary to make it easier to understand the ideas being communicated. Who knows where the hospitality butler will be in another 15 years, but for sure, this book will serve you well until then, whether your aim is to be the best hospitality butler you can be, or you plan to establish a butler presence in a facility that you want to provide superior service. For those thinking outside the box for the next way to "wow" and serve their guests, clients, patients, passengers, etc., this book is a good starting point, a good grounding-for we maintain the thread of superior service enshrined in the butler profession in its servicing of royalty, nobility, the wealthy, and powerful-surely the most demanding of "clients." We present the technology for the modern butler servicing not a single family, but transient, and because of the high level of service they offer, repeating guests and clients.
