Curating a reciprocals list

Access to reciprocal clubs is a major attraction of club membership. Yet the attitude towards reciprocation can sharply divide a club: by and large, club members tend to regard their club’s reciprocals list with veneration, while club management can regard it with alarm.

For the club member, their reciprocals list is a window into a wider world; a way of broadening the reach of Clubland, and a means of exploring how they socialise in other cities. For the management, it can be the cause of headaches - while they can guarantee that every member of their own club is suitably vetted, this certainly does not hold true of visiting members from an outside club. And whereas members tend to have an incentive to behave impeccably within their own club (for if they do not, they will face the music on future visits) this pressure does not exist for the reciprocal member making a one-off visit to a city where they will never return; and the temptation can be there to go wild.

(A well-worn tale, related in Stephen R. Hill’s history of Boodle’s, described a member of that club visiting New York’s Knickerbocker Club and leaving permanent markings on the dining table, from an encounter with a taxi cab driver he had picked up; a former Secretary of Boodle’s subsequently confirmed that the tale had been told the other way around, and that the real-life incident related to a misbehaving member of the Knickerbocker who was staying at Boodle’s.)

I used to run a club’s reciprocals list, and I’m still consulted by clubs worldwide on their reciprocals strategies. One of the most frequent questions I am still asked is to explain how a reciprocals list is built. I am more than happy to share some of the principles here.

Known Knowns, Known Unknowns, Unknown Knowns, and Unknown Unknowns

Most reciprocals networks are forged in ignorance. The more I study the subject, the more I am convinced of this. Even clubs with a very confidently-asserted rationale for their lists can have some decidedly random reciprocal arrangements - and when you scratch beneath the surface, the reason for most existing arrangements tends to be either luck, or that someone knew someone else who took them to a club once, and they were suitably impressed by that one occasion when they were in the right time and the right place. But there is often no rhyme or reason to the list, and members struggle to explain how it came about, or any of the choices or options explored.

To take a slightly more unsentimental approach, I think it may be instructive to look at the matrix popularised by Donald Rumsfeld, about what we know, and what we don’t know:

This is relevant, because some of the most common assertions among club members maintaining reciprocal arrangements are, “This is the only club of note in that city.” Given the thousands of clubs worldwide, it would usually be more accurate to say, “This is the only club we’ve heard of in that city.”

Scoping

For these reasons, the most important thing is for a club’s reciprocals committee to scope what is out there, as fully and as accurately as possible. This will necessarily involve looking at a great many clubs which would no doubt make poor reciprocation partners. Nonetheless, it is only when you have fully assessed the lie of the land that you can make an informed decision.

This is not how reciprocals decisions are usually made. They have often resulted from simple edicts in the absence of information, like “We are going to set up something in [City X], because our members like going there” (ignoring the fact that there may not be much of a club culture in that city, and so no comparable institutions), or the reverse, “There aren’t any clubs there” (when there are many, just none that the committee have come across).

It is with that in mind that I have curated my “Clubland Database” - this Substack has the North America page as a free sample to all readers, and paying subscribers can also enjoy the regional pages for Africa, Central America, South America, Asia, Europe, Oceania, and the Middle East. The database is constantly being updated and revised, as a resource for club committees.

“But there aren’t any clubs in India” is a common view I have heard earnestly expressed in several European clubs. Yet there are over 300 historic clubs across India today - the highest concentration of any country after the United States. A selection of 100 of them can be found in Purshottam Bhageria & Pavan Malhotra, Elite Clubs of India (New Delhi: Bhageria Foundation, 2005). They date back to the 18th century, many are member-run, many have palatial facilities across vast grounds, and they include everything from Winston Churchill’s first club, to the club where snooker was invented.

Aims

Probably the second-most-important question in identifying reciprocal clubs (I’ll come onto the first…) is whether their aims are compatible with your own. There would be no point in the decidedly liberal National Democratic Club of Washington DC seeking affiliation with the Albany Club of Toronto, Canada’s foremost conservative club. Both are perfectly respectable establishments, but they exist for fundamentally incompatible purposes, and the members would invariably not see eye-to-eye.

For that reason, it is worth committees looking at first principles, and the overlap in objectives between clubs.

Some clubs are very strict in applying such criteria of shared aims. For instance, both old and new arts clubs such as the Union Club in London, the United Arts Club in Dublin, the Scottish Art Club in Edinburgh and the Glasgow Art Club, all maintain fairly tightly-themed (and indeed overlapping) lists of reciprocal clubs that are mostly centred around the arts.

Yet there may well be grounds for granting some latitude around having shared aims - indeed, the arts club lists linked to above prove this point, with each still including a smattering of non-arts clubs. The most obvious reason for this is that directly comparable clubs worldwide may be so few in number that a strict interpretation of “shared aims” could rule out having any reciprocal clubs at all, even in major world cities that possess dozens of clubs. This is particularly the case with some of the world’s cities with the highest concentrations of clubs, like New York, Mumbai and Singapore - there may not be a directly-matching club, but there is nevertheless a wealth of club options to choose from.

Culture

The most important question in pairing up reciprocal clubs for a lasting and mutually profitable union is whether their culture is compatible. It may well be that two clubs with similar aims have completely contrasting cultures, while two clubs with differing aims have a highly complementary demographic, culture, and consensus of attitudes. This is inherently likely to be a subjective judgement. Which is where reciprocation becomes more of an art than a science; and where the expertise of the committee comes into play.

Culture may also shift over time - though in many cases it does not, since a club’s reputation for attracting a certain kind of member (or a member with certain interests) tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, fuelling the recruitment of members likely to conform (or wanting to conform) to the club’s pre-existing reputation, while actively putting off many who are not likely to be interested in the institution. In this respect, clubs are much like universities and colleges: however much they might try to recruit the brightest and the best, they still come with an existing reputation which is likely to have a huge influence on who feels compelled to apply for membership in the first place.

Why does culture matter so much? I would propose a “Stranger in a bar” test. It is not unusual for a member of one club, making their first ever trip to a reciprocal club, to be a stranger in the new club. And club bars are some of the few places where it is completely natural to introduce yourself to the person drinking next to you, in a way that might be unusual in a hotel or a public bar. This should be a convivial and stimulating experience, and it should go without saying that you want the reaction to be “We want to meet again”, rather than “What a chore that was, I’m less likely to visit my own club if it means avoiding talking to someone as tedious as that.”

Members and staff

Club culture is the product of custom and practice from two sources: members and staff.

Staff tend to be the more dependable part of the equation: whereas even the most gregarious member, keenly offering their time and expertise for committtee work is still a volunteer. But the staff member has a contract of employment, and is guaranteed to be there to receive reciprocal members. Staff therefore have the bigger role in making reciprocation arrangements work. It is staff who update reciprocal club listings and information. It is staff who issue letters of introduction. It is staff who check the credentials of visiting reciprocal members. It is staff who welcome reciprocal members, and show them around with a “crash course” version of the on-boarding process for new members. It is staff whose professionalism is sized up by the visitor, reporting back to their fellow members at home.

That is not to say that the members do not have a central role in the feel of the club. A bawdy, loud anecdote related by the person next to you may leave a poor impression. But an interesting, unpretentious, open conversation can win over a reciprocal member. To give some idea of the latter from my travels, when I have felt far more at home in a club than any luxury hotel would have afforded:

• Sitting in the library of a club, being beckoned over by members ahead of their meeting for their regular literary lunch. After about fifteen minutes of conversation, they asked me to join them for that lunch - even though I had not read the book they had all read (but they thought that as a historian, I might have something to add to the conversation on this work of history).

• Sitting at the bar of a club I had never been to, after failing to get a table booking. Within five minutes, a complete stranger I had never met before recognised me (“You’re Seth Thévoz - the clubs guy”), and after a few minutes of our chatting, he was able to put in a word to get me a table, for an indecently good lunch with the house speciality - even though it was the club’s busiest time of year.

• Arranging a tour with a club chairman, which was supposed to be a simple, brisk assessment exercise taking in a potential reciprocal club, but we got on so well that it soon became apparent I had made a friend for life, with whom I still keep in touch many years later.

These are anecdotes, rather than data. But they speak to the uniqueness of reciprocation, when it works well. I cannot think of these interactions being found anywhere else. In each case, I hope that I brought something to the interaction, as a reciprocal member: it should never be a one-way arrangement. Remember that the member visiting the reciprocal club should add something to that club, for it to be worthwhile. The club should find it an honour and a pleasure to host the visiting member. That is the difference between a club and a hotel.

Member-owned or proprietary?

Ownership matters. Generally speaking, member-owned clubs (which are effectively run as a non-profit, by and for their members) shy away from affiliation with proprietary clubs that are run for profit - even when the facilities of the latter are comparable, or even more sumptuous.

For that reason, it is important for a reciprocals committee to assess the ownership situation of a potential reciprocal, to reduce the scope for tensions and culture clash. (“They treated me like a hotel guest, not a member!” is not a complaint that any club relishes.)

That said, there are some situations when it makes perfect sense for reciprocation to exist between a member-owned club and a proprietary club. If the shared culture and aims of the two clubs are particularly strong, then the ownership may only be a secondary concern. But this would be a situation where a reciprocals committee would want to closely scrutinise a contract.

Facilities

Facilities are the most visible manifestation of a club: An outsider tends to think of the building, rather than the spirit of the club. Accordingly, I would argue that false impressions are common, being more rooted in whether a clubhouse is grandiose or dingy, rather than in the culture of the membership, and the experience of members.

One side of a club’s facilities footprint is set in stone: if it is a one-room dining club only open for one night of the week, that is unlikely to ever change. On the other hand, the general condition of a club, whether good or bad, can be a fleeting thing in the life-cycle of a club. Clubs can go from boom to bust to boom again over, say, thirty years. For that reason, I have sometimes looked kindly on venerable, highly-respected clubs that might momentarily be going through diminished circumstances, if there is a viable prospect of their bouncing back; it is the equivalent of investing in a diminished stock. That is particularly the case if the Club is likely to be difficult to reciprocate with once it has bounced back. But it does require confidence in its essentials.

Bedrooms

Bedrooms are often of great interest to reciprocals committees, and I can see why. They can be a Godsend to a visiting member, providing safe, reputable, central, affordable accommodation unrivalled by any hotel. Historic clubs tend to jealously guard their accommodation as an amenity, even if it is run at a loss.

Yet that means that excellent clubs are sometimes overlooked, if they cannot offer accommodation. There may be several reasons for this:

• There may simply be no real tradition in that country (or area) of clubs providing overnight bedrooms. For instance, this is why the same 4 Spanish clubs appear on so many overseas reciprocals lists - even though Spain has over 100 historic clubs, including some grand, venerable institutions. Because the membership tends to be drawn locally, there is no demand for bedrooms, and so non-Spanish clubs miss out, socially, culturally and intellectually, on forging ties to some formidable clubs.

• The bedroom accommodation may be under such booking pressure that it is only offered to club members, not to reciprocal members.

• The club may be of a highly focused nature; for instance, a dining club with small premises. These may be very conducive to sociability, but not designed to offer accommodation.

In each of these cases, a club can find itself deprived of a valued reciprocal. For that reason, it can be worth looking at two things: the most appealing matches with and without accommodation. It may well be that the most sumptuous dining club is not the same thing as the club with the best-appointed rooms. Indeed, I can remember the example of a Manhattan club, which a colleague observed was “the opposite of most clubs”, finding the public rooms underwhelming, but the bedrooms luxurious. That would be a classic candidate for a club to combine with another, for reciprocation.

When a club with accommodation is considering reciprocating with a club without accommodation, it is not unusual for the club with accommodation to simply not include the use of their bedrooms as part of the contract; this stops the agreement from being lop-sided.

Location, and context

One of the reasons why it makes sense to literally map out potential reciprocals is to gain an understanding of their accessibility to the traveller. In Europe, clubhouses tend to be on - or just off - a city’s main square (and can be an excellent guide on which parts of a city to visit). Further afield, they can be in far-flung suburbs; and in India it is not unknown for some of the country’s most prestigious establishments to be miles away from the nearest city.

For that reason, it is worth establishing where all the prospective reciprocals are within a city, and the accessibility, safety and feasibility of a visit for the visiting reciprocal member.

As my recent write-up of the clubs of Lisbon illustrated, you can often divine the centre of a European city, just from looking at where the clubs are based. This is a pattern I have often found when travelling to a city I do not know.

It also pays to have a strong idea of the local club culture, and how it varies from wider international trends. (In Navarre and the Basque Country, for instance, there is a tradition of clubs hosting communal kitchens where the members come in and cook for their fellow members - here, it is a valued club amenity encouraging use of the clubhouse, and lucrative bar receipts; but it is easy to see how clubs elsewhere would not countenance the food hygiene risk of letting members cook, or would decry the F&B revenue loss.) Understanding how the regional club culture differs to international expectations not only helps your members to get more out of these clubs, it allows a fairer basis of comparison to the local competition.

Opening hours

In an ideal world, a reciprocal club is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But we do not live in an ideal world. Plenty of clubs are fully or partially closed at the weekend, or are only open seasonally. It is vital to factor in what the club can offer, and when. One alpine club - one of the most prestigious and expensive in the world - is only open seasonally; and its members may only dine there four times a year. But the club has its own alp and ski-lift leading to the restaurant, and the lucky reciprocal member who can only visit it once a year is still deriving a benefit worth tens of thousands of pounds. So the value of an offering should be viewed relatively, and in context.

Human intelligence

Nothing beats the human intelligence of arranging a visit in person: a club which may have a slick and impressive website may still send out alarm bells on a personal visit; and many fine clubs either have no website at all, or else a members-only website hidden behind a paywall.

The visit works both ways, as well: the visiting member needs to leave a favourable impression on the potential reciprocal, so should be selected in part for their skill and diplomacy. For this reason, they may not necessarily be the most senior person in your own club, or even an elected official, so a certain flexibility may be required in who is appointed as a reciprocals ambassador.

That said, beware of the smooth-tongued member keen to obtain a letter under this pretext, simply as the next-best thing to reciprocation, so that they can try to dine there as a one-off. They are not just there to have a good time: done properly, scouting out a potential reciprocal is hard work. It can involve a considerable inconvenience (“I’m going to that city with my family; and my wife and children aren’t happy that the only time this club will see me means I’ll have to miss the concert”), and it means collecting a range of perceptive impressions on the whole range of a club, and swiftly writing them up into a comprehensive report for colleagues - preferably followed up with an in-person discussion on returning home. If a member is not prepared to do the hard work and follow-up, then they should not be doing it at all. Reciprocal committees need workers, not dilettantes.

Communicating expectations

Even clubs with very well-curated lists do not always do this well. Your members need to be properly briefed, with a comprehensive guide on what a reciprocal club has to offer. “That club doesn’t even have bedrooms!” is the kind of complaint you may receive about one of the most venerable clubs in the world, if members do not know what to expect and have false expectations. At the very least, a comprehensive guide for your members should have symbols or colour-coding denoting facilities like bar, restaurant, bedrooms, athletics facilities, golf, etc. The member who understands the kind of club they are about to visit is far more likely to embrace what it can offer on its own terms.

An example of a reciprocal clubs map, this one for the Club Naval de Cascais in Portugal. As a nautical club, its reciprocals are of course heavily coastal.

Also: maintain and circulate for members a map of reciprocal clubs. A written list is not enough. Human beings think visually. Members respond to being able to visualise things on a map. A reciprocals map conveys a huge amount of complex data, very simply.

The search for “the best” club

Some clubs insist that they will only consider “the very best” clubs. Typically, they have little idea what they are talking about. It is rare for one club in a major city to be the stand-out club across the board, in its offering across bar, dining room, accommodation, etc. Even when that is the case, standards can and do vary considerably over time. If clubs dropped off reciprocals lists every time the dining room’s quality dipped for a year or two, there would be few clubs left on them.

There is certainly a frank conversation to be had over whether facilities are of an acceptably high standard to your own club’s members. And it needs to be borne in mind that a club can be “the best” in its city by dint of being the only one of its kind, whilst still offering decidedly lacklustre service (and vice-versa, truly spectacular clubs can and do thrive in faraway locations).

All of which convinces me all the more that the questions on shared culture, and shared aims, are far more important. If a reciprocal club’s members are fellow travellers to your own, and its business fundamentals remain sound, then it is still worth clinging onto a valued reciprocation. This means that some cities may have five or six reciprocal clubs, and others may have none.

It is also important to understand how subjective a reciprocals list has to be. Two of the most common demands from members are for:

1. Access to “the best” clubs (typically without any sense of how this is defined), or

2. Access to virtually all clubs worldwide (often while wanting to still limit access to their own club).

Neither of these demands is coherent or realistic. If it were possible - as some ask - to have a “golden ticket” to all clubs worldwide, then by definition the economics of individual clubs would fold. So, too, would the whole point of a club controlling its own admissions procedure. But if demanding access to all clubs is illogical, I would suggest that expecting access to “the best” clubs is no less of a fallacy.

Limiting the list?

Conventional wisdom often has it that the strongest club reciprocals lists are the shortest. I am not so sure.

That is partly because of the common belief that a short list equals a selective list. But I doubt the evidence bears that out. Firstly, I have seen many reciprocals lists which are very short - and less than impressive - not because the club is selective, but because I would suggest few clubs want to reciprocate in the first place. Secondly, even when I have seen very short lists - say, with only one or two dozen clubs on it - there are still some frankly baffling pairings on there.

All the more reason why I would suggest the central prism for a happy, viable, long-term relationship is around shared culture and aims. Since all clubs are different, this does not mean that there will be such a thing as a template for “the best” clubs, but simply those sharing the most in common with one another.

There can be other pressures on clubs to limit their list, which have little to do with being selective. Under US tax law, for instance, clubs have their tax status adversely affected if more than 15% of their custom is with non-members (including banqueting and conferences) - and usage by reciprocal members count towards this total. Similarly, in some US states, several key provisions of equality law do not apply in small-scale clubs of fewer than a few hundred members who do not entertain outside guests; this is why so many US country clubs resolutely refuse to reciprocate with any other institution, for fear of becoming exposed to litigation.

Monitoring use

If your club has reciprocals, it should collate, process and analyse data - most likely anonymised - on how that reciprocation is being used by those visiting your club.

Most reciprocal arrangements are seldom used. Members love the freedom of potentially being able to visit far-flung clubhouses, but the most striking thing is how few members actually avail themselves. Unless they are already on a business trip or a holiday to a city filled with clubs, very few will go out of their way to do so; thus a major part of the satisfaction is in the choice afforded, rather than even the experience itself. (Although positive reports back from members to their peers are gold dust.)

Monitoring use will help to identify any problems. Is the agreement being abused by a “reciprocal member” who lives just around the corner and is turning up twice a week? Have there been complaints about members of one club in particular? Are the problems limited to one or two members, or are they across the board with certain clubs?

And monitoring use should also help to identify potential improvements. For instance, do reciprocal members tend to visit at certain times of year? Are there ways of reducing pressure on the dining room or the bedrooms by restricting access during certain months of the year?

It is common for clubs to be sitting on a wealth of such data - and for it to not be properly analysed. Yet proper analysis can pre-emptively head off problems, and improve members’ experiences all round.

Monitoring the list

Clubs change over time. All institutions do.

As I have argued above, sometimes an adverse change is merely cyclical, around the business cycle: clubs go through a financially rough patch, and are looking a little threadbare for a few years; but if the fundamentals are right, they will bounce back within a decade.

But it is also worth monitoring if a reciprocal club has sufficiently deviated from the terms on which it was first taken on. Since clubs often have little idea of the original rationale for taking on a reciprocal, with poor record-keeping being commonplace, this can lead to some erratic and capricious stop-go decision-making, depending on the whims of a current committee which does not understand the original rationale for a reciprocation. (It is not unheard of for committees to sheepishly write to another club admitting that they have lost the reciprocals contract, and asking to be sent a copy. Nor is it unheard of for the response to be that the other club has lost its copy, too.)

All the more reason for clubs to maintain comprehensive records of when and why reciprocation was entered into. This will make it far easier to decide on whether the agreement needs to be updated, renegotiated, or rescinded entirely. And it will stop a club from gaining a reputation for unreliability. (“But you approached us for reciprocation, only three years ago! And the very thing you now say is a problem, you said was fine at the time!”)

Conclusion

Reciprocal arrangements, done properly, should be mutually beneficial. They can sustain valued, long-term relationships over the decades, with shared amenities.

Yet curating a reciprocals list is an art, not a science. A web of reciprocal arrangements is almost like a living, breathing organism - clubs are, after all, made up of human beings, not bricks and mortar.

It requires a deep knowledge of club management, global contexts, human intelligence. It needs to be properly monitored, managed and communicted to members. But it can be one of the most valued parts of a club’s offering to its members, enhancing membership with fraternal relations with members the world over.

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