INSIDE HOTEL EXCESS
One guest blew £1,500 on ironing. Others leave their supercars parked there all year. And staff (who earn a pittance) will do ANYTHING – from ordering an elephant to flying your breast milk to the U.S.
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 accommodating 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
contract will be renewed. His job involves pressing socks for people who have never washed their own socks in their lives.
One pair costs the client £6.50 to launder — more than the cost of buying a new pair, he points out. For the express service, which he is fulfilling today, the hotel guest will pay an astonishing £13 to get clean socks.
Maksim tells of once being asked to press two suitcases of clothes, even though each item had already been pressed and was encased in protective plastic. He had to put each item back into plastic. The bill was £1,500 — ‘just for pressing!’.
Today’s batch of laundry includes designer items that have clearly never been worn because the labels (from nearby upmarket store Harvey Nichols, naturally) are still attached.
While some of the excesses are almost understandable (if you can’t use four towels for your bath in a five-star hotel and then dump them on the floor, where can you?), others are staggering.
One kitchen worker takes a room service order for what appears to be a single occupant of a room. She pretty much orders everything on the menu.
The bill comes to £1,000. Yes, for one person.
‘I think they want to see all the food,’ the resigned hotel worker sighs, but even she is appalled. ‘They don’t need that much.’ But where will the excess food go? ‘Bin,’ she says sharply.
That’s another astonishing thing revealed in this programme, the scandalous waste. But what is the alternative?
These hotels, so vital to the British economy, simply must give the clients what they want — even when that seems preposterous.
Is the customer always right? General manager Gerard Sintes says yes. ‘As long as it is moral and legal, we attend to the demands of our guests.’
Perhaps the most astonishing thing is that few of the staff seem surprised or disgusted by the demands of their guests. They are simply resigned to it all.
Why does Maksim think his guests find it acceptable to pay £13 for clean socks?
‘Because they can,’ he says. ‘Because their bank account has 16 zeros and they don’t care about money. They just want.
‘Some people are rich and some people are poor. What can you do? Unless you win the lottery.’
Does he do the lottery? ‘No. It is a tax on hope.’
Doorman Darvin Edwards is one of the most endearing characters in the programme.
He used to be an elite athlete and represented his native St Lucia at the London Olympics.
But his career was cut short by injury and he now works at the Mandarin Oriental, where one of his duties involves parking cars that only billionaires can afford. Not that he’s impressed by the vehicles he gets to drive.
He wouldn’t want to drive the Maclaren he is filmed in. ‘When you sit in it for more than 15 minutes, your back starts to hurt,’ he complains.
But as Darvin walks through the collection of Ferraris, Rolls-Royces and Bentleys in the hotel garage, he points out that several of the luxury cars, including one very expensive motor covered in a protective tarpaulin, haven’t been moved in the entire time Darvin has worked there — over a year.
Can you be rich enough to forget you have such a car or to not need to drive it for a year? It seems so.
This programme, playfully called A Very British Hotel, does a stunning job of lifting the lid on what that means these days.
Even if it’s stuffed with rich overseas guests, the hotel — which is, after all, where the Queen learned to dance as a child, with her sister Princess Margaret, in the ballroom — delivers a quintessentially upper-class experience.
A hop and a skip from Harrods, the royal parks and not too far from Buckingham Palace, it is as British as it gets, right down to the dainty cucumber sandwiches served for afternoon tea.
WHAT isn’t very British are the staff. Of the hotels’s 610 employees, a staggering 80 per cent are foreign. Concierge Francois-Xavier Girotto may wax lyrical, in quite hilarious fashion, about how his approach is ‘firm but gentle, a bit like Margaret Thatcher’, but he is French. So is the general manager, Mr Sintes.
Roman is German. The head of events, Paul, is Irish. The breakfast manager Agnieszka is from Poland. The laundry manager Erika is from Slovakia.
Are any of her staff British? No. ‘I have never had anyone interview for any of the positions who was British,’ she says.
This programme poses the question, but never quite answers it: How has a country like the UK, where history is littered with butlers, valets and maids, ended up with a service industry run by those from abroad?
Not that this hotel’s staff are complaining. And truth be told (though they are far too discreet to spell it out), they love to see the foreign guests coming because they are the big tippers.
During filming, one young rookie concierge called Paul (one of the very few Londoners on the staff) is stunned to be handed £200 for changing a restaurant booking.
He points out that if he spends £30 in Sainsbury’s on his weekly shop, he thinks he’s gone mad.
After the cameras stop running, it seems our Middle Eastern princess has settled her bill, and the hotel staff are expecting her back this summer.
‘This is her home when she is in London,’ says Mr Sintes, all frustrations forgotten.
‘We love her and she loves us.’