Your room is ready for you now…
… along with affordably luxe new openings, indulgent spa treatments and mouthwatering meals prepared by someone else. Our critics are first through the door as hotels reopen
Hotels are back, Baby! Check-in desks, crisp linens, bountiful breakfast spreads, champagne in bed, freestanding tubs (with more champagne?), a place far from the ennui of your own four walls.
Oh, how I have missed them. They have become a collective place where I contain all my fantasies of future “normal” life. In my dreams I’m in a riad courtyard in 40-degree heat in Marrakech; listening to the sirens and noises of a city back to life from a high rise in
New York; sunbathing next to a ladder into the sea on a Mediterranean island. In truth, as it currently stands, I’m staying closer to home: my first hotel booking in a couple of weeks is at the newly opened Glebe House in Devon, a boutique wonder that makes my heart flutter every time I think about it.
And that is what the very best hotels do – make your heart sing. It’s something our Hotel Hit Squad – Fiona Duncan, Hattie Garlick, Mark C O’Flaherty and Sherelle Jacobs – have endeavoured to find for our readers. Every Sunday, they would share tales from the hottest and newest discoveries up and down the country. When the column started, little did we know there might be something so disruptive that it could single-handedly close the hospitality industry for a significant period, casting our Hit Squad into hiatus.
But happily the band is back together, and our roving reviewers are back doing what they do best. Our fabulous four checked in, on opening night, at special hotels: a cabin in the New Forest (one of the bigger hospitality trends to come out of this year); a family-friendly “Wonka factory” in Surrey; and hotels both old and new in London.
Hotels let us escape. The very best of them won’t judge you. They welcome you like an old friend, offer you a glass of something, and take you away momentarily from the year we have just had.