Destination: Ithaca, N.Y. : The Spy in Room 712 : Our intrepid travel writer stays at Cornell’s hotel school and tries to trip up future hoteliers

It is true that ivy shrouds the handsome old walls of Cornell University. That the city of Ithaca is tucked among rolling hills and plunging gorges of western central New York state. That the Finger Lakes ripple nearby. And that in a former school building in downtown Ithaca, the Moosewood Restaurant offers up its hallowed vegetables. For these reasons, many people visit.

Not me. I came to make trouble for the staff of the Statler Hotel.

The Statler is a 150-room hotel on the Cornell campus. It is run by students of Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration, long known as the foremost program of its kind in the country.

In years to come, these students will join the leaders of the lodging industry, managing major properties, settling celebrities into $300-a-night rooms, setting fire to desserts, networking with fellow members of Cornell Society of Hotelmen (whose president last year was a woman), and arching eyebrows when travelers like me arrive in their lobbies in tennis shoes and a blazer that needs pressing. But for now, Cornell’s hoteliers are still pups, and checking into the Ithaca Statler is something like taking a seat in a barber’s college.

The crucial difference, however, is that at a barber college, you are at the students’ mercy, perhaps with a razor to your throat; whereas, at a “teaching hotel” (as Cornell faculty refer to the Statler) it’s the students who are at guests’ mercy.

Now, imagine the hotel guest from hell--a writer traveling undercover who arrives on the day after the busiest weekend of the year, makes repeated, assorted and ambiguous requests, and takes notes as he goes. Wouldn’t such a guest give a few young hoteliers a chance to show grace (or a lack of it) under pressure? And might not such a guest gain a glimpse at what travelers can expect from this nation’s next generation of hoteliers? After all, hotel school dean David A. Dittman has said that one of the best things the campus hotel can do for aspiring managers is hone their people skills in face-to-face dealings with co-workers and guests in challenging circumstances.

About now, my wife, Mary Frances, who possesses no mean bones in her body, would step in to stress that there were other factors in favor of this expedition (visiting our good friends Chuck and Kim, who live just outside Ithaca, being JUST one). But the bottom line is that I saw a chance to be cruel, and I took it.

Ithaca lies in the middle of the Finger Lakes region and is reachable by commuter plane, but we wanted to see the countryside, so we rented a car at New York’s Kennedy airport and drove in, a six-hour exercise punctuated first by multiple expressway exits, then by cow sightings, barn admiration and diner food.

Eventually, Ithaca was in view, a place generally given over to studying, hiking, fishing, boating, antiquing and wine-tasting (there are nearly 50 wineries in the region). Also, umbrella opening. There’s snow in winter and plenty of rain all year, thus explaining the bumper stickers announcing the “Ithaca Rain Festival, Jan. 1-Dec. 31.”

The city’s population is about 30,000--which means that Cornell, a part-public, part-private university with undergraduate and graduate enrollment of about 19,000 and a 745-acre campus, dominates the place.

In the middle of the grassy campus stands the Statler Hotel, rectangular and generic, its interior arranged in the Hyatt/Marriott/Hilton/Sheraton tradition of distinguished, inoffensive furnishings, subdued lighting and dark woods. Commemorative plates acknowledge contributions from various big names in the hotel business, many of them connected with the building’s opening in 1989. The adjoining executive education center is named for Marriott, the library for Stouffer, the cocktail lounge for Regent (now known as Four Seasons Regent), the fancy restaurant, Banfi’s, for a prominent winemaking family.

The hotel is not, unfortunately, as cheap as a barber’s college haircut. The Statler, the costliest hotel in town, sets its rates at $140-$155 nightly for double rooms and disdains discounting for weekend and leisure travelers. (Cornell employees and groups do get special rates.)

My troublemaking had begun modestly, with an evening call to make a reservation using a relatively obscure discount card: Impulse, which promised 50% on nights of low demand. Sure enough, the student reservationists on that shift were neither briefed on the discount nor empowered to offer it. My reservationist suggested I call back during their business hours.

This, I thought, is going to be interesting.

But a reservationist on the day shift was, in fact, able to help me, and my wife and I were soon booked in a view room for $77.50 a night, and ready to bring our spying campaign onto the premises.

We thought timing would be important. Graduation ceremonies had been held May 27 and 28, probably the most demanding days of the year for the Statler. We rolled up on May 29 at about 1 p.m.--two hours before the hotel’s specified check-in time. Then we called for a valet to park our car, a bellman to take our bags and a clerk to find us a room immediately.

So they did. In short order, a gregarious young man was unloading the trunk and offering to roll up our windows for us so that we wouldn’t be delayed. The front desk sent us to a fine room (on the seventh floor, with a broad view of Sage Chapel, the McGraw Tower atop Uris Library, and the green hills of Ithaca beyond), and a bellman was soon hanging up our coats (without being asked; very nice) and telling us which restaurants were open.

*

The restaurants are among the Statler’s appealing eccentricities as a teaching hotel: Along with Banfi’s there is the Statler’s 200-seat Terrace Cafe and Bistro, where a weekday diner may find the cuisine and atmosphere Arabian, Israeli, Mexican or Thai, depending upon the student-devised theme of the day. Serving four nights a week, the cafe offers more than 40 different themes and cuisines in the course of a 13-week semester.

Unfortunately, if you arrive on the day after graduation, that restaurant is closed. So we headed downstairs to Banfi’s to grab a late lunch and perhaps catch the staff napping. And so we did. The place was almost empty, yet several minutes passed before a host spotted us and led us to a table. But the waiter smoothed things over, expertly explained the menu, and promptly brought us a tasty sandwich, mini-pizza and chocolate raspberry cheesecake. He wasn’t even a hospitality industry student, it turned out, just an undergraduate who needed a summer job.

Among the Statler work force, about 75 are full-time professionals and about 200 are students, identifiable by the name tags that also give their anticipated year of graduation: Chris, ’97. Tom, ’96. (Hotel school students are required to put in 800 hours of work in the industry before graduation.)

This can be unglamorous work, especially when one considers that most hotel school undergraduates are paying about $25,700 a year for this schooling, including tuition, books, housing and meals. James Hisle, a 1968 hotel school graduate who returned to become the hotel’s general manager in 1991, sees value in it, for just that reason.

“It’s important for some of our [more privileged] kids to come here and scrub toilets, to get some sense of what it would be like to do this every day,” said Hisle when I spoke with him after our stay. “They’re going to be managing people who are coming to work and cleaning 14 toilets every day . . . How do you motivate and train people who face these conditions every day? The hotel business is like every other business; it’s a human resources business.”

*

Back to our campaign of mischief. Once the bellman was gone, we set to inspecting our quarters, beginning with the bathroom. There was no phone in there (subtract one point), but there was a remote television speaker, so that we could keep up with Bosnia and DNA testimony while showering (add one point). We had no complaints about the toilet. (In fact, this whole toilet-scrubbing thing leads me to wonder: How much more pleasant might this world be if every Ivy League undergraduate were required to spend a few hours cleaning toilets?) The rest of the room had the same prosperous, vaguely corporate feel as the lobby. The window opened, the bulbs lit, the drawers slid.

We called housekeeping and asked for an iron and ironing board. Ten minutes, they said.

Eight minutes later, iron and board arrived.

Later, when I spoke with David Dittman, dean of the hotel school since 1990, he named technology and time as key factors in the next generation of hotels. Aside from the essential people skills, he said, staff will need fluency in all sorts of computer software designed to streamline service and billing. Right now, the Statler is expanding its use of “guest history” software, which allows reservationists at high-end hotels to recall the preferences of return guests--an ironing board, for instance, or an extra pillow. (The same software can tell a reservationist if you skipped out on your bill last time.)

Cornell’s hotel school, founded in 1922, was inspired by the Swiss institutions that for generations have produced top European hoteliers. Cornell’s program was the first of its kind in the United States. These days, it counts more than 50 faculty members, and about 800 undergraduate and graduate students whose schedules are built around classes such as Organizational Behavior and Interpersonal Skills, Casino Management, Business and Hospitality Law and Wine in Culture and History. But Cornell’s on-campus hotel has not always been so nice.

Before 1989, the campus hotel was known as the Statler Inn, and had fewer than 60 rooms in far less impressive facilities--”an embarrassment,” in the words of one graduate. And even in its new quarters, the hotel faltered at first, attempting to deliver five-star service and setting prices so high that a state employee on business trips couldn’t afford to stay there.

In 1991, the hotel brought in a new general manager and decided to aim for four-star service instead of five. (The Mobil Travel Guide currently gives it three stars.) Now, Dittman reports, the hotel turns a profit.

The school, meanwhile, no longer has the field to itself. Scores of U.S. colleges now offer four-year degrees in one aspect or another of hospitality industry management, including the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Golden Gate University in San Francisco; Florida International University in Miami; and the University of Houston, where the Conrad N. Hilton College of Hotel and Restaurant Management has run the 86-room University Hilton since 1969.

*

We did eventually give the staff a break and head out on the town. We joined up with our friends Chuck and Kim, ogled the alleged house of Carl Sagan and peered down at the main campus waterfall. We went out to dinner at venerated Moosewood Restaurant (black-eyed pea gumbo, pasta with creamy cauliflower sauce, Caribbean roasted vegetables, Greek cannelloni and happy diners all around the table). We strolled along the storefronts of Ithaca Commons. Then we came back upstairs, called room service for apple pie a la mode, and started watching the clock. Ten minutes later, there were our desserts.

It was time to get devious. Late that night, I hung out a breakfast order that called for either one continental breakfast or two, depending on how the kitchen staff read it. When a waiter arrived in the morning (exactly on time), I sensed victory: He had brought one continental breakfast instead of two. I pointed to the order and explained that we had had two breakfasts in mind.

The waiter looked as if he had been struck by a nun with a ruler. He apologized for the misunderstanding and backpedaled rapidly out of the room. A few moments later he was back with another breakfast--and assurances that we wouldn’t be charged for it. In the trade, I learned later, this is known as “service recovery.”

In my book, it was clearly a sign to throw in the towel (rather than stealing it) and acknowledge my failure as a troublemaker. Two hours later, we checked out.

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GUIDEBOOK

Cornell’s Hotel U.

Getting there: Continental Airlines offers round-trip restricted coach fares beginning at $488, flying LAX-Newark and the connecting via commuter plane to Tompkins County Airport, a few miles from downtown Ithaca. USAir offers round-trip restricted coach fares beginning at $488, flying LAX to Pittsburgh or Philadelphia and then connecting to Tompkins County Airport.

Where to stay: The Statler Hotel, 11 East Ave., Ithaca, NY 14853; telephones (800) 541-2501 or (607) 257-2500. Double rooms with a view: $140-$155.

Where to eat: At the Statler, there’s Banfi’s, with continental cuisine (dinner entrees $10-$18) and the Terrace Cafe and Bistro, which offers an ever-changing dinner menu during the academic year, and cuts back to breakfasts and lunches in summer. In town, Moosewood Restaurant (215 N. Cayuga St; local tel. 273-9610) serves vegetarian fare in creative combinations (dinner entrees $9.50-$11; no reservations taken).

For more information: Tompkins County Convention and Visitors Bureau, 904 E. Shore Drive, Ithaca, NY 14850; tel. (800) 28-ITHACA or (607) 272-1313.