Derek Pacqué drove three hours from Manhattan to The Haussman Resort, Pool Club and Smokehouse on Long Island for Friday Night Audit. In LIE traffic, you know it's bad when the cars start passing you, then a horse and buggy passes you, then an elderly woman with a walker passes you. That's Friday in the summer on Long Island. Derek made it anyway.
He runs Chexology, the bag and valet check company you'll find at 1,200+ venues — the Mets, MoMA, Barclays Center, TD Garden, the O2 in London. It started as a coat check hustle in Indiana college bars, because drunk people are bad at holding onto tickets. Then he went on Shark Tank ABC and turned down the investors.
Somewhere in there, my cat made a break for the front door. Breaking news, as we called it on air.
His colleague Neil Upadhyay joined from #Vegas with the best line of the night: after a rival's bag-check system fell apart so badly staff walked off and police started holding people's Birkin bags, Chexology got the call. Nothing sells a hospitality product like "the last guys lost custody of designer handbags to the LVPD."
We closed, as one does, with me cannonballing into the pool and someone threatening to throw the laptop in after me.
#FridayNightAudit. Happy hour, hospitality news, zero dignity.
Want the weekly roundup of news, videos, and what you might've missed from #NoVacancyNews? Text HOTEL to 66866.
