While in Puerto Vallarta this year, I thought to ask a friend of mine who lives there much of the year to tell me about the mix of hotels in the city. “There are as many schools of thought about what a hotel is or isn’t here as there are resorts that think they are or aren’t,” he says.

At the farthest end of the spectrum, so far away from the city they could be any place, are hotels that call themselves resorts: they are the “all-inclusives” that offer not only an “American” plan of three-meals-plus a day, but—having alerted guests to all things that go bump in the night while warning them not to get too chummy with the culture and diversity of the city—are compelled to supply within the “confines” (the word is apt) of their inclusivity an amusement of restaurants, bars, shops, spas and other pleasant diversions that attempt, rather ineffectively, so says my friend, to replicate what guests might discover if they dare venture off the property. “They’re not resorts,” he says. “They are adult daycare centers.”

If you think that’s just my friend talking, listen to what syndicated travel ombudsman, Christopher Elliott, has to say about Barcelo, a hotel in Vallarta: “[U]nderstand that this hotel is an all-inclusive resort, meaning that it’s designed to be the kind of place you never have to leave . . .”

Before many of us leave the United States for any place in Mexico, Puerto Vallarta included, there looms the likelihood something awful will happen there because—as we all know—drug cartels occupy every square mile of the country. It doesn’t matter this looming is based erroneously on media accounts that neglect to report that nearly all cartel activity and violence is concentrated in and restricted to areas that afford drug traffickers easy access to “markets” in the United States. Puerto Vallarta isn’t in one of those areas; not even close.

The tourism industry in Puerto Vallarta is conscious of the looming, but that’s about it. No need, says the city, to raise a flag alerting tourists to the possibility that something nasty might occur, when nothing nasty has occurred there for years and probably never will. And yet several hotels, aware of tourist unease, remind guests who are on edge that their hotels are safe havens; there to shelter them from unease, never mind that none exists. The “all-inclusives” have become sanctuaries for tourists who are afraid; who get to know Puerto Vallarta only from the inside of their hotel or the cab to and from the airport.

At the other end of the spectrum—180 degrees from it—is Villa Premiere Hotel and Spa, the focus of this article, which we will get to in a minute. In between are the chains that appeal to tour groups and the companies that sponsor business conferences, meetings and seminars. They are comparable to their counterparts back home; and, include—give them credit—a smattering of Puerto Vallarta’s ethos to convince guests they’re somewhere exotic. The problem? No matter how hard they try to radiate a Mexican relevance, they fall short: in order to preserve the cookie-cutter consistency of the chain, they become ultimately just another link in it where guests might have trouble knowing where they are: “Am I in Puerto Vallarta or Chicago?” These are not resorts; they are properties.

Villa Premiere Hotel and Spa offers, as do most other luxury hotels, an American Plan, but given its proximity to the city’s mile-long boardwalk, the malecon—jam-packed with restaurants, bars, art galleries, jewelry shops, noise and more activity than you can shake a maraca at, with side streets that lure tourists off the beaten path to explore other fascinations throughout the nooks and crannies of the city—most guests opt out of the hotel’s American plan, preferring to immerse themselves in the diversity and culture of the city.

Tour-guide books tell you Villa Premiere is half a kilometer from the malecon. That’s guidebook talk. The reality? The moment guests leave the hotel, they are swept up into the hum and pulse of the city, a harbinger of what awaits when they arrive, half a kilometer away, at the beginning of this magnificent Pacific oceanside walkway.

According to Susana Ramirez Horta, corporate sales manager, “The malecon has a variety of restaurants and bars. All offer dining options that appeal to our guests, even those on the American plan. With choices like that, many guests on the plan eat breakfast only here.” That’s a predicament Villa Premiere shares with hotels in the U.S.: even in cities with a reputation for fine dining, fabulous hotels continue to offer fabulous assortments of fabulous restaurants with fabulous chefs. Never mind nobody eats there.

No matter how great the foodservice at Villa Premiere, most guests dine and drink elsewhere even though two of the hotel’s three restaurants, El Manglar (Mediterranean with traces of Mexican tastes) and Murales (Mexican) are as good as or better than the best Puerto Vallarta has to offer. The third restaurant, poolside, is open for guests of the hotel and only for breakfast and lunch. The exec chef is Mexican. Says Horta, “That makes a great deal of difference.” Implication? Not many hotel chefs are.

The Villa and Samano families own Villa Premiere. They also own its precursors, the Buenaventura Grand, next door, and Hacienda Hotel, off the beaten path a bit; and will, shortly, operate (not own) a fourth, the 340-room, luxury, full-service Tau Resort, under construction and scheduled to open later this year or early next. It’s in the state of Nayarit, adjacent to Jalisco state where the other hotels are.

Co-owner Abel Villa passed away before the families broke ground on Villa Premiere, but Abel’s son, Abel Villa Fernandez, CEO of the parent company, Buenaventura Hotels, and Antonio Samano—architects and designers—built Villa Premiere.

Keep in mind, this was not just a case of Messrs. Fernandez and Samano deciding to build another “hotel by the bay,” adjacent to its 236-room, “kids welcome” Buenaventura Grand just because they owned the land. There was, thankfully, measured reckoning and premeditation to their design: to build not just any hotel, but a luxury hotel so close to the energy of the city it would become an integral part of the community, welcomed and embraced by it. Detractors were skeptical, thought the decision ill-considered, pointing to the incongruity of it: every other luxury hotel was miles away from the pull of the city. For crying out loud, the Four Seasons, at 25 miles from the city, might as well be in another country. What could the families be thinking?

Says CEO Fernandez, “We wanted to build a small and intimate hotel with a new concept, completely different from what was available in Puerto Vallarta’s tourism industry.” Adds Samano, “Our main objective was to identify the best product that would provide a unique experience: luxurious, yes, but separate in terms of product, amenities and service from what the competition was offering.”

Premiere Buenaventura opened February 6, 1999. After renovation following Hurricane Kena in 2004, the 83-room, adults-only (16 years and older) hotel was rechristened Villa Premiere Hotel and Spa.

It falls on Abel Villa Sanchez, corporate sales director and son of CEO Fernandez, to market Villa Premiere. Given the combination of a lousy global economy and what he calls, “the overblown reporting of drug-related violence by the media,” sales are a challenge no matter how hard he tries to convince guests and tour operators that Vallarta and, it follows, Villa Premiere, is fantastic, a great vacation destination, safe. The “convincing” part comes up wherever he goes and at every sales meeting he attends. It might be the toughest part of his job. “I have to anticipate people asking me about this,” he says. “I can’t control the media. I can, however, the perception. That’s part of my sales effort.”

I tell Alessandro Stifani, the hotel’s operations manager, what Sanchez has told me. “Let me ask you something,” he says. “If in your country you were taking your family to Disneyland and on your way there you heard about murders in Los Angeles, would you cancel your trip? Of course not.”

The marketing support tour operators (major partners are in California) provide Sanchez is indispensable, the biggest reason he is as much a watchdog of Villa Premiere operations as is Stifani who oversees a staff of 165 in every department in the hotel from front desk to housekeeping, food and beverage (40 of them there) to security. If guest services should deteriorate and news leak out that it has (i.e., social media buzz), Sanchez knows he will lose travel agent and tour operator support for Villa Premiere and conceivably for the other two hotels and the one soon to open. Sanchez and Stifani interact. They review every guest comment, good or bad, and every guest complaint that could impact sales. “It’s especially critical,” says Sanchez, “if the complaint arises from a misunderstanding related to sales. I don’t have to tell you that our staff is the most valuable asset we have, the most expensive line item.”

Says Stifani, “We offer all sorts of unique services every other luxury hotel offers: we’ll unpack or pack your luggage, shine your shoes, bring you bottled water and fresh fruit at the pool, but our policy is to do whatever it is we think our guests need before they think they need it. What so many other hotels forget is that we are in the service industry. There is no such thing as an unreasonable guest request. For the most part we comply with whatever it is the guest asks for.

“However,” Stifani adds as a caveat, “we may be able to anticipate guest needs, complaints, and so forth, but we must continually remind ourselves that in the final analysis, it’s our guests who decide what their needs are.”

This is all about guest needs and expectations and how Villa Premiere rises to the occasion to meet them. What is most apparent at this splendid hotel is that absolutely nothing unexpected takes place here. That is as it should be. Expected expectations are a given. Guests demand that. This is, after all, a luxury hotel with luxury rack rates. Everything about Villa Premiere—from rooms to pool to beachfront amenities to foodservice to its minimalist design (exception: the marvelous artwork in and the designs of the restaurants and lobby), both inside and out—screams luxury; and Villa Premiere takes pains to brag about all of that (modestly, of course) in its marketing, advertising, promotion and online.

Yet, screaming luxury will inevitably fall on deaf ears if, in the screaming, the hotel fails to inform screams with services that fulfill guests’ expectations. Employees at Villa Premiere, without fanfare, guilt, pretense or apology, day after day dole out services that exceed guests’ expectations. The hotel refuses to settle for anything less.

Service is a career throughout Puerto Vallarta and especially at Villa Premiere, unlike in the U.S. where it is typically transitory.

What persuades critics and associations to award stars, kudos and other assorted frou-frou to hotels (Villa Premiere is the recipient of AAA’s Four Diamond award) is not only the substance and scope of the look and feel of the hotel, but the attitudes of employees and their willingness (absent, as noted, of pretense) to augment their responsibilities with a sensitivity that bespeaks anticipation and consideration of and compassion for every guest’s indulgence, be it appropriate or not. There isn’t room for compromise or shortcuts, as could happen in low season when occupancy can dip to 30% (high, last year and this, 80% to 85%; 2008: 95%). When that happens, managers remind employees to adapt: to modify their behavior so it exceeds what normally passes as extraordinary. During downtimes, when hotel activity languishes and guests are neither here nor there, employees have a tendency to languish, too. Hence the reminder.

Corporate Sales Manager Susana Horta, gets it right when she tells me, “Yes, we train and we have rules, but we make sure our employees who come in contact with our guests have the freedom to express themselves naturally, not according to something that might be scripted in an employee manual. Friendly and natural, not forced and mechanical.”

Ronald Vega is Villa Premiere’s corporate operations director, in and of itself, a fulltime job, but his passion is food and beverage, a passion he honed in f&b with Marriott in Brazil. Make no mistake, he shares with Stifani, Sanchez and Horta the commitment to service excellence; he also understands f&b must be of a quality that matches all else the hotel provides; that it is as much an essential ingredient of service excellence as, for example, the welcome, poolside service (fluffy towels and all that), roomservice, aromatherapy in guestrooms and so forth.

“If we can control f&b,” he says, “we can handle just about anything and that includes cost controls, marketing, expenses, and profits everywhere; not just f&b.”

Throughout Puerto Vallarta are U.S. fast food and midscale restaurant chains. They exist for visitors who crave the familiarity and reinforcement of American tastes, reluctant to sample anything unfamiliar, unless it’s a Taco-Bell imitation. That’s a concern, Vega admits, but an inconsequential one.

“Food is an integral part of the Mexican experience and its culture; an integral part of our service. For guests who really want to know and to have the Mexican feel and value, they can get it here.

“Our menu mix must appeal to our guests. You come to stay with us from the U.S. expecting a menu that reflects the local cuisine. Anything else is a broken promise, a failure to do what it is we are supposed to do. We provide a food and beverage product that anticipates what our guests come here for. We are, however, very flexible: we check guest comments and pay attention to their preferences; our chef can adjust to whatever the guest wants.”

Ultimately, is that not what exceeding guest expectations is all about; that the hotel will accommodate, within reason, every guest excess, request, demand and plea that, regardless of their nature, match the hype of the hotel, and reflect and are consistent with its style and pace?

A guest staying at Villa Premiere may insist on getting from Point A to Point B quickly, minus detours or speed bumps. Villa Premiere, on the other hand, would prefer to see guests arrive where they want to go serenely and leisurely even if it means merely going from their rooms to the pool or restaurant or entrance. Style and pace. Villa Premiere pampers. A lot of four- and five-star hotels crow about doing that. Villa Premiere delivers; it’s part of its DNA.

“We update guest history hour after hour,” says Allessandro Stifani. “We review everything that has happened the day before. If there’s an issue, no matter how incidental, I go at once to the guest and talk to him or her. Pampering is a priority. Complaints? We find solutions immediately.”

“We try to avoid ‘second efforts,’” says Vega. “That’s when we fail to anticipate guest concerns and then must take measures to resolve them after the fact; after the guest complains.

“We don’t like to get complaints. We don’t want our guests to feel we don’t take care of them. The ‘first effort’ is when we anticipate a guest complaint or concern and fix it. Second effort? We’ll fix it,” says Vega, “but, isn’t that too late?”

The Walmart Port of Call
Fears of violence in Mexico still linger, even among tourists who visit Puerto Vallarta. Hotels are aware of the perception and some—as noted—take measures to allay the fears. Cruise ships, too, that call on Vallarta are aware and caution passengers who decide to disembark, to be careful. Many who do that travel no further than what one cynic calls “The Walmart Port of Call.” There, passengers, once disembarked, purchase trinkets and souvenirs and a lot of other stuff so that once back on board—no longer worried about insinuations of a culture that might possibly offend or of run-ins with bad people—they can ooh and ahh their purchases in the comfort and security of their staterooms, assured that, indeed, they now have proof they were, for one brief shining moment, in Puerto Vallarta.