INSIDE HOTEL EXCESS
eVER tried to leave a luxury hotel without paying for that tub of Pringles from the mini-bar? Whether it’s by accident or design, such an error would result in an awkward scene at best.
If you are super-rich, though, different rules apply. If you are a Middle Eastern princess, for instance, it seems that you can waltz out without paying for anything — anything at all.
Even when you’ve run up a bill of £200,000, you can just breeze through reception and into your limo with no one trailing frantically in your wake brandishing a credit card machine or summoning a security guard.
Such are the revelations in a jaw-dropping new TV series where documentary cameras go behind the scenes at the five-star Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park in Knightsbridge, one of the most exclusive hotels in London.
If there was ever any doubt that we are a divided society, then this programme confirms it. Rarely is the contrast between the haves and the have-nots more acutely observed than in an upmarket hotel, where the richest members of society co-exist alongside some of the poorest.
This place makes Downton Abbey look like a bastion of equality and fairness.
It makes compelling viewing. In the first episode, the eternally accommodating staff are filmed pulling out all the stops for one of their VIP guests, a member of a Middle Eastern royal family, who is decamping to London to escape the desert heat.
The Queen of Sheba could not get a more attentive reception than this lady.
A near military operation swings into action to meet her every whim. An army of staff is mobilised to handle her 200 pieces (yes, 200) of luggage, which arrive in a lorry.
Her £7,000-a-night suite is adapted for her needs. One room is transformed into a playroom for her children; blackout blinds are installed in her bedroom.
Additional rooms are booked for her nanny, staff and entourage. But then in one night’s stay at this hotel, this particular princess spends roughly £20,000. She is one of their top ten clients and considers the Mandarin Oriental as a home from home.
None of this is surprising, of course. Middle Eastern royals are the creme de la creme of clients for top London hotels because they are the biggest, bling-iest spenders of all.
Every five- star establishment in the capital is desperate to woo them.
At the Mandarin Oriental, any guest foibles are not only accepted, but embraced.
sHOuLD madam need to find an elephant for a party she wants to throw (an outlandish request from a bride who once stayed there) or have breast milk flown from London to Boston (from a businesswoman delayed unexpectedly in London, while her baby is in the u.S.), this hotel can arrange it.
Training classes for staff point out how ‘special’ the Middle Eastern guests are and how their eccentricities — a very casual approach to checkout time rules, for instance — should be accepted.
‘We are lucky to have them,’ staff are told. This princess has one quirk that you would imagine even the most accom- modating hoteliers would be reluctant to indulge, though. She has a peculiar tendency to leave without paying.
As cameras follow him scurrying round the corridors, the front of house manager Roman Griesshaber admits that one of his challenges is how to broach the vulgar subject of payment with their wealthier clients.
The super-rich, we learn, don’t have to leave their credit card details — like the rest of us.
‘One of the many things I learned from dealing with certain royal families is they most likely will not pay their bills straight away,’ he says.
He explains that after this princess had stayed the previous year, her bill was simply not paid.
Polite requests for settlement once the lady had gone home were ignored.
It took hotel staff a staggering nine months of cajoling emails and phone calls to get their money.
So this time round, they were prepared. Watching, towards the end of her stay, as an increasingly nervous Roman tries to instigate a conversation with someone in her entourage about who might, possibly, if it’s not too much bother, settle the bill, is just excruciating.
The outcome? The princess waltzes out again without paying and poor Roman can’t seem to do much about it.
‘You’re not able to tell such people: “You can’t leave the hotel”,’ he says. ‘That would be a little bit of an issue.’
But would he allow a normal guest to leave without paying? ‘No, we wouldn’t,’ he admits.
Doubtless the managers of every single high-end hotel in London will watch such scenes and wince in recognition.
Nevertheless, for the viewer the programme is an eyeopener, and the antics of this pampered princess are just the start.
It also highlights, however, how the upstairs clients and the downstairs staff need each other, and the whole delicate balance must be as painstakingly maintained as the bathroom marble.
It’s a fascinating, clever programme, at once making you want to book into the Mandarin Oriental for an entire month, yet also raising uncomfortable questions about what goes on beneath the glitter.
Some of the well- heeled guests are interviewed. Actor Morgan Freeman says that the only demand he makes in posh hotels is privacy; author Jilly Cooper throws a rather splendid party; and when Ronnie Wood pops in, he is greeted like an old friend.
But most of the action is seen from the point of view of the staff, the lowliest of whom aren’t on much more than the minimum wage.
dOWN we go into the bowels of the building, to the laundry room where the grubbier side of this business is laid bare.
There we find 26-year- old Maksim, who hails from Lithuania and has only recently been able to afford to rent a room in London that he doesn’t need to share with his mother.
Maksim — brimming with ambition, and the consummate grafter — is paid £7.20 an hour and spends much of the first episode worrying about whether his short- term