A Room of Her Own

By Nancy Gibbs

Wander into the Reeves private hotel, a tidy Victorian row house overlooking Shepherd's Bush Green, and you can easily imagine yourself in any of central * London's small, discreet hotels. The woman at the front desk will offer a cordial greeting as you check in, tell you about the facilities and invite you to have tea or a drink at the bar. Unless, of course, you are a man. In that case, you will be urged, very graciously, to leave.

The Reeves is the first and only one of its kind in Britain -- a hotel designed exclusively for women. Though the owners cannot by law refuse male guests, no man has stayed in the rooms, which cost about $75 a night, or been served in the bar since the hotel opened in February 1988. "We're not hostile to men," says manager and co-owner Carole Reeves. "We're just trying to put women first. Men's needs are catered to quite adequately in other hotels."

That is a point much in dispute in the British travel industry. The existence of the Reeves is an indication of how rankled some travelers are by the standards of other London hotels. The Businesswoman's Travel Club, founded two years ago to "provide a voice for women who receive second-class service when they travel," conducted a survey earlier this year that yielded a flood of complaints about life on the road. Many women are tired of ironing skirts with a trouser press or drying long hair on a space heater. Says Kirsty Maxey, 25, a marketing executive: "It's about time hotels realized that the 'executive' amenities they supply are fairly useless to a lot of the executives traveling these days."

Among the women's chief complaints are outdated attitudes, poor facilities and inattention to security. "If you're looked up and down by a haughty hotel doorman who assumes you're a hooker, it's not very welcoming," says the BWTC's marketing coordinator, Trisha Cochrane. In hotel bars, the survey found, a woman alone must often wait to be served because the bartender assumes that someone will be joining her. In the meantime, she is left to fend off the attentions of other patrons at the bar. Said a respondent: "I'm tired of being chatted up by every lonely salesman in Britain."

In the restaurants, meanwhile, women find it difficult to play host at a business lunch or dinner, since waiters typically assume that the male guest will choose the wine and pay the bill. Female travelers also complain that hotels can be careless about revealing room numbers and too often place women in insecure locations, such as ground-floor rooms without door chains or peepholes.

Thanks in part to the increased number of female business travelers and the lobbying efforts of the BWTC, the complaints are being heard. To attract female guests, several hotel chains have introduced new features -- some quaint, some useless, but many very welcome. Crest Hotels now offers "Lady Crest" rooms. The redesigned suites are more softly decorated than regular executive rooms, and come equipped with hair dryers, makeup mirrors, women's magazines, skirt hangers, irons and ironing boards, and an expanded range of bathroom toiletries. Similarly, Ramada takes care to assign women to specially outfitted rooms in well-lighted areas, and will not put through telephone calls unless they are first accepted by the guest. Other hotel chains have substituted coded plastic cards for room keys and are more careful about revealing a guest's room number.

While the chains have been redesigning rooms and retraining staff to keep up with women's demands, the entrenched London bastions are unconcerned. "I don't believe there should be separate quarters for the ladies, like some female ghetto," says Giles Shepard, managing director of the Savoy group of hotels. "It is women who are made to feel more uncomfortable when a lot of special arrangements are made for them." Many businesswomen would agree -- so long as simple courtesy, convenience and safety are not viewed as "special arrangements."

With reporting by Nancy Seufert/London