"A benchmark for customer service"? :lol::lol: This, from a course which cut back its grandstand viewing to flog off 'loges' for a grand a day, which failed to provide Sheikh Mo's private boxes with their own loos, which totally cut off all view of the racing after an overblown refurbishment which turned even the royal enclosure into a free-for-all in beer-swilled concourses, which had all of its refreshment facilities bar the booze bars close before the last race of the day, which hasn't got any available free seating unless it's underneath a horsewalk tunnel or half-a-dozen bog-standard garden benches at the back of the stands... ah, yes, they have indeed set a benchmark for customer service. As in a zero.
There's a far better ethos at any amount of far humbler courses without Ascot's clinging delusions of 19th Century grandeur. Dreadful, dreadful nonsense. Look - you put up info on your website, you acknowledge online or postal badge sales with a little notelet saying what you will and won't accept as clothing, you come on RUK and ATR to announce your new ideas, you get an article up in the RP and every other possible outlet before the day and, then, when and if people turn up sartorially under-achieving your goal, you turn them away from the Premier gates. You don't admit them wearing the dot of shame. Christ, what bloody next? A little blue sticker to say you're not of a pure bloodline to Alfred the Great?