TRAVEL INSIDER : Diamonds (Five, Please) Are Hotels’ Best Friend : Ratings: Even veteran managers tremble when influential automobile club inspectors visit.

One day about 14 months ago, a customer who shall remain nameless walked into the Ritz-Carlton Marina del Rey. She was circumspect and observant, stayed a weekend, then handed over a business card that quickened the general manager’s pulse.

She was an inspector from the Automobile Club of Southern California, and she wanted to see a few more rooms. Every year, similarly anonymous men and women appear in more than 20,000 lodging establishments across the country, paying their own way, quietly comparing their accommodations to the demands of the 21-page American Automobile Assn. “green book.”

On that day in late 1991, John Dravinski, manager at the Ritz-Carlton Marina del Rey, joined the inspector for a walk through five rooms. It wasn’t entirely smooth sailing; Dravinski still remembers that disappointing moment when the inspector reached up and found a bedside lamp without the preferred three-way bulb. But on the whole, the inspector was pleased, and so were the two other inspectors who made anonymous follow-up visits in ensuing months. They reached under furniture to check for dust; they called the front desk to ask for phone numbers; they ordered wines not on the wine list, just to see how the restaurant’s waiters would respond.

Finally, just after Thanksgiving, word reached the Ritz-Carlton folk that the 1993 auto club guidebook would bump their rating from four diamonds to five, the highest possible. Among the hundreds of other hotels in Southern California, only the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel and the Four Seasons Hotel Newport Beach--both in Orange County--are ranked so high. (For more on those hotels, see below.)

There was much rejoicing. And on Dec. 22 a team of auto club representatives returned to Marina del Rey to join more than 300 staff members in celebration and share details of their evaluation with the hotel staff.

“The attention to detail was very impressive. It was unbelievable,” says Dravinski, who has spent 25 of his 43 years in the hotel business. One inspector, for instance, had stared carefully across the desk when checking in: Would the hotel’s front-desk clerk merely slide the key across the counter, or would the clerk had it over, with eye contact? There was eye contact, and it was noted.

But Dravinski remains guarded. Now, he says, he’s regularly reminding his staff that “all glory is fleeting. The celebration is over, and now the responsibility is with us, and we’re all very aware of that.”

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Of the many organizations that evaluate hotels and restaurants, the auto club is almost certainly the most influential. Drawing on its 145 regional affiliate clubs throughout the country, the club annually publishes 23 regional guides to hotels and restaurants throughout the U.S. and Mexico, and makes them available free to the club’s 33 million members and associate members. Last year, club officials say, they distributed 36 million guides.

“That’s a very impressive figure,” says Ken Hine, president and chief executive officer of the American Hotel & Motel Assn., who calls the auto club’s appraisals “preeminent” in the field. “Their information is respected,” says Hine. “And the awarding of a diamond is a tremendous boost. That fifth diamond is not easy to come by.”

(The second-most-recognized evaluator of U.S. lodgings is probably the Mobil Travel Guide, which started awarding one to five stars to hotels and restaurants in 1958. The Mobil guide is published by Prentice Hall Travel books, which estimates that last year’s guide to California and the West, priced at $14, sold 1 million copies. This year’s guide is due in February.)

Though the first auto clubs were born about 1905 and the first guides were printed more than 50 years ago, the five-diamond rating system wasn’t established until 1977. These days, the national office in Heathrow, Fla., spends an estimated $4 million a year to employ 60 field inspectors and send them from hotel to restaurant to hotel. The association’s West Coast affiliate, the Automobile Club of Southern California, employs another four full-time inspectors.

The auto club estimates that there are some 44,000 lodging establishments and 438,000 restaurants in the United States. This year’s AAA guidebooks assess 21,564 hotels and 8,445 restaurants, including many in Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean, and award five-diamond ratings to just 48 properties. (Aside from the hotels noted here, the 14-year-old L’Orangerie restaurant in Los Angeles is the only Southern California property to win five stars from the auto club.)

“They basically taste, touch and feel your operation, top to bottom,” says Ray Jacobi, general manager at the Four Seasons Hotel Newport Beach.

Nationwide, one in 500 hotels gets five diamonds, and one in 25 gets four. Roughly 44% of hotels get three diamonds, 40% get two and 11% get one.

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But things have been changing since the economy went sour. Clarence Garlough, manager of approved accommodations for the Automobile Club of Southern California, reports that “housekeeping and maintenance programs--especially deferred maintenance--have been a problem.”

Cost-conscious hoteliers are leaving carpeting, furniture, beds and draperies in place longer than they used to, he says, and those practices are showing up in the list of hotels his inspectors put on “probationary status”--meaning that they’re in danger of being downgraded. In years past, Garlough says, his inspectors were revisiting about one hotel in seven because it showed signs of slipping. This year, he says, the rate is closer to one in five.

Most inspectors earn $22,000 to $30,000 a year. Some are retirees or part-time business people accustomed to traveling often; others have risen through AAA staff ranks. They usually visit a property once a year, unless a top-notch rating or a substantial change in status is at stake. In their “green book” of standards, they consult requirements for parking, landscaping, the width of hallways, the existence of service elevators. (For the restaurant industry, there’s a separate “yellow book.”)

Hoteliers call them “mystery shoppers.” To remain mysterious, veteran inspectors often obtain credit cards under a pseudonym to avoid detection by desk clerks with good memories.

In the rarefied range of four and five diamonds, service is the key variable, and more is always better. The Four Seasons Hotel Newport Beach, for instance, has 550 staffers serving a facility with 300 rooms, a much higher staff-to-guests ratio than travelers are likely to find in most three-diamond hotels. In less persnickety hotels, says Garlough, the key is a “high maintenance and housekeeping level, with fairly up-to-date, good-quality furnishings and decor.”

For those who make the appraisals, the hazards can be considerable. Under mattresses and in dark corners, inspectors have found old pizzas, hypodermic needles, ears of corn and, once or twice in Wyoming and North Dakota, live snakes.

Inspectors nationwide share such tales in a privately circulated newsletter called “Field and Scream.” One 1992 issue included the tale of one inspector who ended up seating customers in an understaffed Tallahassee restaurant, and another who accidentally flew to St. John’s, Newfoundland, instead of St. John, New Brunswick.

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A quick look at the three five-diamond hotels in Southern California:

- The Ritz-Carlton Marina del Rey, the only five-diamond hotel in Los Angeles County, opened Oct. 15, 1990. Before it reached its five-diamond rating this year, the hotel won four-diamond ratings from the auto club in 1991 and 1992. Its 306 rooms rent for published rates of $175-$2,000 nightly. In addition, the hotel has two restaurants and access to 15 yachts for charters and private parties at additional cost. One of the yachts is “The Wild Goose,” a 134-foot vessel that once belonged to actor John Wayne.

- The Four Seasons Hotel Newport Beach, which opened in 1986, also moved from four diamonds to five this year. The hotel has 300 rooms at published rates of $165-$1,800, and two restaurants. Guests get guaranteed tee times at the Pelican Hill Golf Course, five minutes away.

- The four-story, blufftop Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel, built in Dana Point in 1984, was the Ritz-Carlton company’s first destination resort. Every year since 1985, it has won five diamonds from the auto club. It includes 393 rooms at published rates of $195-$2,500, three restaurants and 18 acres of gardens. The hotel also exploits its position next to a popular beach by offering lessons in surfing and other water sports.