… but what’s interesting is to see how they respond to their mistakes.

I just had a typical road-warrior’s experience at the Tokyo Westin Hotel, where I’ve been staying all week: I ordered a room-service meal just before checking out and heading for the airport, and it didn’t arrive. This was a surprise, because everything else at the hotel has been incredibly efficient, courteous, and dependable; but it’s something I’ve experienced at hotels throughout the U.S., Europe, and other parts of the world, and I was prepared to descend into a foul, ugly mood all the way to the airport.

This might seem a bit extreme if you’re not a frequent traveler, but veteran road warriors are probably nodding their heads and chuckling at the memory of familiar experiences. Here’s what happens: on the last day of your business trip, you’ve got a well-timed countdown clock and checklist of things that have to be done before zooming out of the hotel for a final day of business meetings, or a taxi to the airport. You’ve got clothes to pack, business files and reports to organize and put away, a dozen emails and voice-mails to answer before logging off from the Internet and shutting down your computer. There’s a flight that needs to be reconfirmed, especially if the weather is problematic, and there’s the routine of checking the closet, the bathroom, the bedside night-stand, and the bureau drawers for the stray toothbrush, t-shirt, and travel alarm clock that you sometimes overlook and leave behind…

… and, if you’ve planned all of this reasonably well, there’s a final meal to order up from room service, to provide some nourishment for the long trip home. In days of yore, you sometimes skipped this step, because you could count on a decent meal on the homeward plane flight; or you knew that you could get a decent bagel and cup of coffee in the airport coffee shop. But these days, you can’t count on any of that; you’re lucky if the airline serves a tiny bag of peanuts, and the airport security line is so long that you can’t be sure you’ll have time to pick up a snack at the coffee shop. And besides, it’s probably closed, or fresh out of coffee. So a decent room-service meal is not just a convenience, it’s a downright necessity.

If you’ve been staying at the same hotel all week, you’ve already ordered up room service breakfast and dinner several times — and you’ve got a pretty good idea of how long it takes from the moment you place the order until the surly, bored hotel worker knocks on your door. The room service menu might promise that all meals will be delivered within 10 minutes — “or the meal’s on us!” — but you’ve learned that it’s more likely to be half an hour. So, on your final morning, you order your room service breakfast 45 minutes before you need to walk out the door, just to leave a little margin for error, as well as a few minutes to wolf down the food.

All of this is so familiar, so practiced, that you don’t even stop to think about it; it’s unconscious, it’s instinctive, and it almost always works. Almost, but not quite always: on one trip out of ten (if you’re having a bad stretch of luck), or one trip out of a hundred (if the Travel Gods have been smiling upon you), the food doesn’t show up at the appointed moment. Now what?

If you’re like me, you use that margin of error — the extra 15 minutes between the 30 minutes that you thought it would take, and the maximum of 45 minutes that you can allow before leaving — for a follow-up call, to see if the delivery clerk got kidnapped somewhere between the kitchen and your room, or whether the kitchen exploded in a cloud of radioactive smoke. In the U.S., for example, it’s not uncommon for the room-service phone to ring,and ring, and ring, and ring … and never get picked up. Or a slightly desperate voice will say, “Could you hold for a moment, please?!?”, after which you’re put on hold for a few minutes, and then disconnected. Or you’ll get a laid-back room-service clerk who listens to your inquiry about the whereabouts of your meal, and drawls, “Dude! Hey, dude, we’re kinda busy here, y’know? I mean, Billy Bob and Mary Lou didn’t come in to work today, God only knows if they ran away and eloped or something. And me and Wanda are feeling pretty hung over, y’know, cause we got a little high last night and partied like it was 1999. And it seems like every gosh-darn guest in this hotel wants some kind of fancy breakfast, and they all want it at 7:30 pronto, y’know? And so we’re doing the best we can — but you’re just gonna have to be patient, dude!”

In Europe, you never know what kind of response you’re going to get. I’ve had room-service clerks in Paris tell me that because I had placed my order in English, my food was delivered to the wrong room. I’ve had humorless room-service clerks in Frankfurt tell me that I must be mistaken, because they had no record of anyone in my room ever ordering anything from room service, ever. And I had a room-service clerk in Rome tell me that of course my breakfast order had not been delivered to my room, because they only served breakfast in the ground-floor restaurant (which may have been absolutely true, but doesn’t explain why they were willing to take my order, if they didn’t intend to deliver it).

So that brings me back to the Tokyo Westin — where I had learned, after a week-long stay, that when they said they’d deliver a meal in 30 minutes, it really meant 15 minutes, maybe sooner. That may sound like a minor point, but it means that you need to place your breakfast order after you get out of the shower, not before, or you’re likely to have an ever-so-polite room service clerk trying to bring your orange juice into the bathroom while you’re brushing your teeth. Anyway, things had been fine all week: the right food (don’t even get me started on the stories about getting scrambled eggs when you ordered fried eggs, or bacon when you ordered sausage, or cold oatmeal instead of any eggs and breakfast meat, or tea when you wanted coffee, orange juice when you specifically asked for grapefruit juice, and seventeen little plastic packets of mustard served with your scrambled eggs, when they intended to bring ketchup, on the theory that red-blooded Americans desperately want to slather ketchup all over their eggs and their toast and their bacon, and maybe even their orange juice and their coffee), at the right time, served with a smile.

But not today. On this final day in Tokyo, everything on the checklist was getting checked off, right on schedule, and at the appointed moment — 15 minutes before I was scheduled to march out the door with my rollaboard suitcase, I turned and waited for a knock on the hotel room door. Instead of breakfast, on this occasion, it was lunch that I was waiting for; and the timing was further constrained by the fact that (a) the official checkout time in the hotel was 1:00 PM, and (b) I was scheduled to take a 1:30 bus from the hotel to the airport. (In case you’re wondering why I didn’t just hop into a taxi, the answer is simple: Narita Airport is about 50 miles out of the center of Tokyo, and a taxi ride is likely to cost as much as $200-$250. No kidding. Everyone takes a train or a bus to get to the airport.)

In any case, the knock on the door did not come at the appointed moment; so after another minute or two, I reluctantly picked up the phone and pushed a button marked “Service Express.” A polite voice answered the phone instantly, and when I asked about the status of my order, I was asked to wait for a moment, and put on hold. Uh, oh, I thought. There goes lunch.

But she came back on the line in less than a minute and said, very apologetically, “I’m sorry, sir, I was the one who took your order … but I made a mistake. Would it be okay if we brought your order to your room within 15 minutes?”

The notion that someone would actually take personal responsibility for a mistake, then apologize for it, and then offer to rectify the problem within a reasonably speedy 15 minutes, was a bit of a shock. So I could hardly respond in the surly and hostile fashion that I use with the Parisian, Frankfurtian, Roman, and American room service clerks; but there wasn’t time to accept the gracious offer: “I’m sorry, but I have to check out in 15 minutes, so there won’t be time. Please just cancel the order.” This led to a long string of sorry, sorry, oh-so-sorry, sorry, sorry apologies from the room-service clerk , which finally got me to the point where I felt that perhaps it was me who should be apologizing for creating so much anguish on her part.

So I hung up the phone, peered into my wallet to see if I might have enough left-over Japanese currency to buy a meal at the airport, and reached over to get my suitcase. But then the phone rang again; it was the same apologetic room-service clerk who said, “Sir, I’m sorry sorry oh so sorry. Could we bring your meal up to you in five minutes?”

“I’m really sorry, too,” I said. “But I’ve got to leave in ten minutes.”

“Well, maybe we could serve your meal to you in the terrace room of the hotel?”

“Thanks,” I responded. “But I have to check out of the hotel at 1:00.”

“Yes, sir, we know that,” she said. “And we know that you have a reservation on the bus to the airport at 1:30. But you could stay in your room past the 1:00 checkout time, and you would have time to eat your lunch before the bus arrives.”

Whoa! I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that they knew I was checking out, though you normally wouldn’t expect a room-service clerk to take the initiative to figure out such things. But what really surprised me was that they had also noticed that I had placed my reservation for a seat on the airport bus with the hotel concierge, had calculated that there was probably enough time between my checkout and the bus departure for a civilized lunch (after all, I had only ordered a club sandwich and a diet coke!), and that perhaps they could thus recoup their grievous, sorry sorry oh-so-sorry mistake.

How could I refuse such an offer? Sure enough, the meal arrived within five minutes, carried into my room by the sorry, sorry, oh-so-sorry room-service clerk and an equally apologetic supervisor. The supervisor noticed that I had my suitcase and briefcase strapped together and ready for departure. “May I take these downstairs for you, sir? We’ll bring them to the front of the hotel, so they’ll be ready for you when the bus arrives.”

And when I showed up at the front desk, 15 minutes later, to check out of my room, the room-service clerk stood by my side, still apologizing profusely for the horrendous error of having lost the order. She and the supervisor then insisted on escorting me out to the bus, and waved at me as the bus pulled away.

I’m writing all of this on the bus ride to Narita — which takes forever — and I couldn’t resist the temptation to peek at my hotel bill. I wonder … it really would be too much to expect, but I wonder … hmmm, yes, they did put the room-service lunch charge on the bill. After all, TANSTAAFL: there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

But I’ll tell you something: next time I come back to Tokyo, I know where I’m going to stay. And if the nice people at the Tokyo Westin would like to bring about peace on earth and good will toward men, I have a long list of hotels in Paris, Frankfurt, Rome, and a dozen cities around the U.S. where the sorry sorry, oh-so-sorry room-service clerk could teach a bunch of people what service really means.