T-Mobile CEO John Legere, in a since-deleted tweet, declared to his 3.5 million followers that lack of a full room service menu overnight at the W Hoboken is ‘cray’.

He apparently private messaged the @SPGAssist twitter account. He did not, however, like their reply.

Those tweets were deleted as well, perhaps because it likely comes off as entitled which isn’t the image you want when you run the nation’s third largest wireless carrier with about 70 million subscribers. It makes you seem out of touch with your customers, when you’re trying to create a down-to-earth image offering service and plans to ‘disrupt’ the industry. It also might not play well with his bosses at Deutsche Telekom.

However I do think that he has a point, to a certain extent. Now, there are clearly room service options that he dubs ‘snacks’. But overnight in a pinch you can make a meal out of snacks. He wasn’t going to go hungry. This is the W not the Peninsula or Four Seasons.



W Hoboken, Credit: Starwood

And he could quickly google “Hoboken 24 hour restaurants” and come up with something like this. After all Postmates is 24 hour. Or check out Yelp’s Best 24 Hour Delivery in Hoboken.

Still, W Hotels used to aggressively promote that their service line was “Whatever/Whenever” whatever you wanted, any time, they’d get it for you.

Though they promoted stories of crazy things they did for guests in the middle of the night, it didn’t usually work out so well. I once hit the Whatever/Whenever line at the then-W San Diego around 5:15 a.m. and asked for coffee. I was told that was simply not possible before 6 a.m. What-ever. I walked several blocks to Starbucks.



W San Diego Extreme Wow Suite Living Room

Something I learned years ago from Randy Petersen about customer service. When I first visited his office on Frequent Flyer Point in Colorado Springs he had a small training room and a printed sign said to never say ‘no,’ that should be replaced by “what I can do for you is…”

The W Hoboken should have listened to what Legere wanted, worked to understand it, and helped to come up with the best approximation within constraints including his budget. @SPGAssist should have done the same.

When I was a kid, my late father — who had been a DJ on the radio at one point — told me you don’t go on the air and talk about your golf game. Now, I violate that rule every time I write about flying first class using miles, but our audiences are different. Flying first class with miles is sort of the point of this site. Radio listeners wouldn’t connect with a DJ’s golf. And T-mobile customers wouldn’t connect with his inability to get whatever food he wanted whenever in the middle of the night.

(HT: Reid F.)