Virtuoso, Amex or booking direct in Bali? You are buying the second email

I used to take the shampoo home.

Also the soap, the body lotion and the little sewing kit nobody has ever used. For years my bathroom cabinet looked like the storeroom of a mid-sized resort. I drew the line at the batteries in the remote control. I’d like some credit for that.

It came with the job. The magazine I ran never accepted free nights, so every room I wrote about, I paid for. That turned me into a hunter. FlyerTalk was my bible. I knew which promotions stacked, which card paid what, and which rate quietly included breakfast. I arbitraged hotel nights the way other men follow football.

So I’m the last person to tell you the benefits don’t matter. They do. I just spent years collecting the wrong thing.

What was wrong with booking through Amex?

Nothing, on paper. For a long time I booked through Amex, and Fine Hotels + Resorts gave me exactly what it promised: breakfast for two, a credit of around a hundred dollars, an upgrade when there was one, and a late check-out.

Wanted an early check-in? I typed it in a box, and the box went to the hotel. Along with several hundred other boxes, from several hundred other guests.

What I never asked myself was who I was booking with. Amex is a travel agency too, paid by the hotels like any other. So I wasn’t choosing between an agent and no agent. I was choosing an agent who would never write to the hotel.

The hotel read my box and treated me correctly. Correctly is what a good hotel does for a guest it has no reason to notice. In Bali, at these prices, it’s an expensive way to be looked after.

What changed when I booked through an advisor?

Some of the people I’d argued with on the forum for years, about stacking promotions and whether an omelette station counts as a hot breakfast, became travel advisors. So I started booking through them.

I’d love to tell you it was dramatic. Mostly it wasn’t. The deals were sharper than anything I’d found myself: three nights for the price of two, four for three. Breakfast I didn’t pay for. And more often than I’d expected, a room two categories above the one I’d booked. Once or twice, three.

What made the difference was an email I never saw. My advisor sent the same requests Amex would have sent. A few days later he sent a second one. Had everything arrived? Was the room on track? Had anyone looked at the upgrade? That second email told someone in the building that this booking had a person behind it, and that the person would ask again.

I only understood what it was worth when I started sending it myself.

What does that look like at midnight in Ubud?

This summer a client booked his first trip to Bali. Fourteen nights in Ubud, with his wife, at a hotel I know well.

The introduction came from Wayan. Before he started showing my clients the island, he spent years working in Ubud’s five-star hotels and restaurants, and he still knows half that world by name. He gave me the number of someone at the hotel he trusted. That one phone call turned into the whole fortnight.

I knew two things about my clients that no booking form would ever ask. They sleep lightly, and they hate light. I also knew something about Ubud that the brochures leave out. The nights are loud. The jungle doesn’t go quiet after dark; it starts. Insects, frogs, things you can’t identify and would rather not. For most guests that’s the soundtrack of the holiday. For a light sleeper it’s two weeks of lying awake.

So we went through the rooms together, she and I. One with proper insulation from the valley. Blackout that was actually black, not the grey glow most hotels mean by it. And because these two plan their holidays around what they eat, I made sure the hotel knew that too. The kitchen would be the reason they came back, or the reason they didn’t.

What came back was more than I’d asked for. A room two categories up. Something off every dinner and every spa treatment for the full two weeks. None of it was on any list of benefits.

Then the flight. Twenty hours, with a connection, landing late. Wayan collected them at the airport and could see within minutes that they were finished. Exhausted, and hungry with it. By then the hotel restaurant was about to close.

So Wayan rang the hotel from the car. He ordered dinner on the road, somewhere between the airport and the rice fields. When they pulled up, nobody asked them to check in. The staff walked them straight to a table where the food was already waiting. While they ate, their bags went to the room. They were in bed around midnight, in a room that stayed dark and quiet until morning.

They slept brilliantly. For two weeks. I checked, with the same person at the hotel, several times while they were there.

Nobody at the hotel did any of this because my clients were famous. They did it because someone had called, someone had asked, and someone would be asking again. Which raises the obvious question: why would a hotel bother?

Why would a hotel go to all that trouble?

Because from the hotel’s side of the desk, an advisor’s booking is a different kind of booking altogether. Once you see the arithmetic, the rest follows.

Start with what a booking costs. A reservation through one of the big platforms comes with a hefty commission attached, and the platform keeps the relationship. The hotel gets a name and a card number. An advisor costs the hotel less, and brings something the platforms never hand over: a person who knows the guest.

Then look at what the guest does once he’s there. Someone who arrives through an advisor has usually been told where to eat, which treatment to book and which day out is worth the drive. So he eats in the restaurants, books the spa and takes the excursions. He cancels less, too, because someone helped him choose the hotel in the first place. For a hotel, the room rate is only part of what a guest is worth. The rest is spent after check-in.

And then there’s the part that matters most, which is the future. A booking site sends a guest. An advisor sends a guest, and then another, and another, for years. The hotel isn’t really looking after one reservation. It’s looking after a relationship.

The only way a hotel can court an advisor is through the advisor’s clients. A better room. A table held on a busy night. A treatment on the house. A manager who knows the name before the car pulls up. None of it is charity. It’s how a hotel says: send us the next one. The guest is happier, so he spends more and comes back. The advisor remembers which hotels looked after his people. Everybody gains, and the only one who has to do nothing at all is the guest.

Amex sits somewhere in between. It’s a big organisation, it negotiates its terms programme by programme, and the benefits it gets are much the same as mine. But the relationship is with a programme, not a person. Nobody at Amex will remember which hotel looked after you last March.

Timing matters as well. A hotel is at its most generous when it needs to be, and a hotel at half occupancy in February is a very different conversation from the same hotel at Christmas. Knowing which is which is half the job. The hunter in me never quite left. It’s the same game I played for years. The prize just ends up in someone else’s bathroom cabinet.

Who is on the ground when something needs sorting?

Between us, Wayan and I cover both sides of a hotel. I understand luxury: what a great room should feel like at three in the morning, and whether a kitchen is cooking or just performing. Wayan understands how it actually works. He knows the roads, the timings and how a top hotel runs from the inside, because he worked in them. More often than not he knows the housekeepers by name, and the people who run the building too. He does everything, and nothing is beneath him.

Not everyone wants a driver waiting at arrivals, and nobody has to have one. But there is always someone on the island who can step in, day or night, when something needs sorting now rather than tomorrow.

What does it cost, and is it worth it for just a room?

It costs nothing. You pay the hotel its own rate, directly. The hotel pays me after you’ve stayed. The full explanation is here.

I know “free” is the first thing everyone asks about. It’s also the least interesting part, a bit like being told the best thing about a restaurant is the complimentary bread.

And yes, it’s worth it for a single room. Most of my bookings are exactly that: one hotel, a handful of nights, no special requests. It takes you one message. The benefits come attached, the second email still goes, and you won’t hear from me again until you want to.

Status with Marriott or Hyatt? You keep it. Points and elite nights count as if you’d booked direct. What that status actually gets you varies more than people think, as the Marriott piece explains.

Booking direct, Amex or an advisor, side by side

What booking direct, Amex Fine Hotels + Resorts and a Virtuoso advisor each get you at a luxury hotel in Bali

	Booking direct	Amex Fine Hotels + Resorts	Through an advisor
The rate	The hotel’s own	The hotel’s own, often prepaid	The hotel’s own, to the cent
Breakfast	Rarely included	Daily, for two	Daily, for two, at most hotels
Credit	No	Usually around $100	Usually $100 or more
Upgrade	If your status earns it	Subject to availability	Subject to availability, and followed up
Late check-out	If your status earns it	Until 4pm	Arranged in advance
Hotel points	Yes	Yes	Yes, at Hyatt and Marriott
Who can use it	Anyone	Platinum and Centurion cardholders; terms vary by country	Anyone
After the booking	You and the front desk	You, the front desk and a call centre	You, the front desk, me, and Wayan on the island

Benefits vary by hotel and season, whichever way you book. Ask about a specific hotel and you’ll get its real list before you commit to anything.

So what are you actually buying?

Not the breakfast. You can get that three different ways. Not the credit either, which is much the same wherever it comes from.

You’re buying the second email. The one that tells someone in the building your booking has a person behind it. And on this island, you’re buying someone on the ground, who can pick up a phone at eleven at night and have dinner on the table by the time you walk in. You’ll never see any of it being arranged. You won’t need to.

I spent a decade collecting shampoo and benefits. I thought I was collecting perks. What I was really collecting, on the trips that mattered, was proof that somebody had asked.