A little flirting goes a long way. That’s a lesson for you, Hong Kong

“i’m a princess.” So says one of my good friends as she flashes a high-wattage smile at the concierge, flirts a little and explains just how royally she wishes to be treated at his hotel. She’s charming (and it doesn’t hurt to be that gorgeous either) and she gets what she wants wherever she goes.

Another friend creates a fuss. Two out of three meals I share with him are marred by returned bottles of wine and complaints about service. The thing is, he gets what he wants too (although there maybe a little something unordered in those returned meals).

So how do you get what you want? A recent Synovate survey asked affluent Hong Kongers about our city’s service standards and their own attitudes to service. The results were, frankly, a little alarming.

What stopped me in my tracks was not that nearly two-thirds of well-off Hong Kong people think service is better than it was five years ago (I do too); it was not that 95 percent of us are assertive enough to tell service organizations what we expect; and it was not that one third of us think that the single most irritating thing about service in Hong Kong is “rude service staff.”

Rather, it was that only one percent of respondents use charm as a way to get the service they want. » next