Manuel and odd stains... that’s life beyond the lobby in Britain
FANCY splashing about in a £3.5billion infinity pool that looks like a surfboard, perched atop three towers in Singapore? Or a stay in an eco-lodge in Ecuador, where you can watch a hummingbird theatre, and a poor man with tired arms whose job it is to keep the moisture on the picture windows at bay?
Or a sojourn at the Royal Mansour in Marrakech, where 350 curtains are hand-pleated daily, and a room isn’t a room – it’s a riad, with private plunge pool, fireplace and Bedouin tent? Or the £20million Fogo Island Inn, Canada, where your stay means you are not just saving your marriage, you are saving a race of island people from extinction? Then just switch on the BBC for a dose of pure hotel porn.
I’ve been addicted to Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond The Lobby, the BBC2 series hosted by Giles Coren and Monica Galetti, which ends tomorrow night.
The series follows a grand tradition of salivating peeks behind the doors of the world’s fanciest hotels (usually featuring presenters so cringingly supine that they make Judith Chalmers look like Jeremy Paxman).
Take A Very British Hotel, a recent Channel 4 series about the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge, part of a chain owned by a British conglomerate incorporated in Bermuda; or Sky’s Hotel Secrets, hosted by Richard E. Grant.
Our fascination with these ridiculously expensive establishments (a night on Fogo Island STARTS at over a grand), is fuelled, I think, by a sort of Downton Abbeyesque need to glimpse perfection.
Here is a world where you are collected from the airport by a vintage Rolls-Royce (The Peninsula, Hong Kong), there is no need to sign your name or hand over your passport (the Plaza Athenee, Paris), and the moment you sink into your waterbed in a marble spa suite, having been scrubbed naked from head to toe (the Es Saadi Hotel, Marrakech), you can escape all the troublesome baggage that will never be allowed to clutter your room (though your Vuitton trunk will make it safe and sound).
It’s all very well. However, the reality of most hotels, particularly provincial hotels in the UK, is very different indeed. They are not temples to perfectionism – they are shrines to suspicious stains. Rooms have plug sockets so secreted that you need to be a Chinese contortionist to reach them. You also have to be Derren Brown to be able to find the remote control (‘It’s in ze second drawer down of ze desk’).
You have to become habituated, for the first time since 1972, to unzipping a sachet of Nescafe into a cup and undressing a teeny square of Walkers shortbread (the only sustenance you’ll get as the minibar is as barren as my womb and room service stops at 10pm). You will require a microscope and tweezers to uncork the dolly-sized shampoo (why is there never, ever hair-conditioner in these beige prison cells?) in the shower over the narrow bath, which inevitably has a non-slip rubber mat that’s seen better days (only arthritic pensioners, I presume, are poor enough to want to stay here). Provincial hotels always have a sign saying ‘Danger! Hot water!’, when the only real risk is that the hot water ran out long ago.
WHEN you book in to a British hotel that isn’t owned by Arabs or oligarchs, you immediately feel you should be clapped in irons. This happened to me last Friday when I checked in to a hotel in Surrey that looked lovely on the website, but turned out to be like an NHS asylum fallen on bad times: all fire doors (there are no fire doors at the Mercer in SoHo, New York; I even spotted Meg Ryan in the lift!), rancid carpet and a room so hard to find I needed satnav.
The receptionist ‘pre-authorised’ my card to the tune of £152. When I checked out the next day, I paid £202.54, settling the entire bill. A week later, the £152 was still missing (stolen) from my account. I phoned them up. ‘Where is it?’ ‘It will be returned to your bank, ‘H’ EVEN-TUALLY!’, said someone with a heavy accent. Haha! Manuel is alive and well and abusing guests near Richmond Park! At least some traditions hold good…