Left High and Dry, Mostly

Sometimes you just roll the dice, and you get what you get. We planned a close-to-home Valentines getaway, a night at a fancy place in Richmond and dinner on the town. I made reservations at The Berkeley Hotel, a small buth elegant place, fronting onto Richmond's cobblestoned and gaslit Shockoe Slip. www.berkeleyhotel.com The funny thing about hotels in your hometown is that only business travelers from other cities ever really see them, so I didn't have anyone to ask for details.

The Executive Parlor Room certainly sounded nice. What pictures the website offered made it look nice. And in the end, I am more than prepared to conced, it was nice, large, beautifully decorated, with an enormous, pillow-topped cloud of a bed. No false advertising. (My wife nevertheless strongly advises requesting a room that faces away from Shockoe Slip, since it's a busy nightspot, with revelers and at least one powerfully-voiced street-preacher discussing the fine points of drinking and damnation until the wee hours.)

The Berkeley's site, though, presents an all-too-common problem for the tub-oriented among us: scant details about and no images of the bathing possibilities. In our room (507), at least, the bathroom was enormous. At 9 feet wide by 15 feet deep, I've literally had rooms in mid-town Manhattan that were smaller. But that precious real estate mostly empty, just a ballroom's worth of marble floors, with a plain, old contractor-special tub in the far back corner. At the very least, they could put in a twin-sized, glass-walled steam shower in the unoccupied 4 by 5 space that serves currently only to allow the bathroom door to swing 180 degrees open.

The Berkeley holds, and in many ways deserves, a AAA four-diamond ranking. I am convinced, however, that fine hotels like this need to continually step up the competition, to hone and improve their offerings, in order to remain at the top. Invest in spa-style upgrades, highlight them on the website, and watch the laggards fall behind.

Remember, hotliers: There are no patrons more loyal than the soaking crowd.