If you're in the hotel business I've been most of the last 19(!) years, you may know the fable of the blue tape.
When a new hotel opens, in the weeks before welcoming guests there are all sorts of final finishes going on. Walls must be textured and painted, woodwork stained and sealed, tiles laid, mirrors placed, artwork mounted just so. This process is repeated for 100, 200, 300 times...or more. Once for every room and suite; once for every hallway; once for every elevator lobby; once for every public space and meeting room; and on and on.
In the course of all this finish work there are inevitably small (and sometimes not so small) errors that pop up. A piece of trim has an inadvertent gouge; the artwork that was supposed to go above the bed accidentally ends up above the desk; tile grout didn't quite make it all the way into all the crevices.
This is where blue tape arrives to save the day. Those in charge of a hotel opening use roll upon roll of blue painter's tape to help them create a "punch list" for each hotel room. A ragged square of blue tape marks every flaw in the finish work. Workers are drawn to the blue tape to fix the flaw, allowing them to remove the marker.
Most rooms end up slightly freckled with blue tape spots. Some rooms end up worse than a sunburned Raggedy Ann.
Now, often this is because the hotel opening team is (rightly) super-anal about every single nick, uneven surface, and overpainting throughout the hotel. Once the hotel is actually open, the rooms only make money if they're occupied. It becomes exponentially harder to get all the details right once the guests start to populate the place.
So, in the last few weeks before a hotel opens, blue tape sprouts up everywhere. I just witnessed this during the pre-opening of our new Macon Marriott City Center hotel - a stunningly gorgeous hotel that will instantly become the premier accomodation for 75 miles in any direction.
Walking through the property and enjoying its bright, vibrant color palette, I also noted the ever-ubiquitous blue tape. Some squares marked marble tiles that were ever-so-slightly misaligned; others pointed to a minor crinkle in the wallpaper; still others noted an unnatural color variation in stain between two trim pieces that (as befits the finest Marriotts) should look more conforming.
Most of these pieces of blue tape will disappear just before opening, as the engineering team performs their "punch lists" and makes the minor, and sometimes, major repairs necessary.
But this is where the fable of the blue tape gets interesting: Because there are always too many pieces of blue tape, and so many rooms to "punch," and so many niggling flaws from floor to ceiling...a few pieces of blue tape always slip through the cracks and remain after a hotel opens.
Sometimes for years.
If you're like me and look up from time to time when staying at classy hotels around the U.S., you too might spy an odd looking scrap of blue tape in a corner somewhere. I spot them every once in a while.
If you do, you're peering back into the hotel's history to that frenzied time when the hotel was fresh and new...and full of little errors. That piece of blue tape marks something that someone saw and wanted fixed...but missed in the chaos of pre-opening.
