"I want roses! I want parrots!"
HIGH-MAINTENANCE HOTEL GUEST
BABYSITTERS for their parrots, gourmet meals for their pooches and gift-wrapping a Bentley.
Those are just some of the bizarre requests from posh people staying at South Africa’s fanciest hotels.
Whether they are business travellers or holiday makers, guests have stretched hotel staff’s ingenuity — and patience — to the limit with diva-like demands and unlikely whims.
According to some of the leading hotels in South Africa, other unusual requests include sourcing 8 000 roses from Ethiopia, having the room temperature set at minus 10°C, being given a massage with “a happy ending”, or stirring out the bubbles from a bottle of champagne.
Michael Nel, general manager of Cape Town’s luxurious five-star 12 Apostles Hotel and Spa, said that when guests made such requests they considered it normal.
“I think people have learnt that they can get weird and wonderful things from hotels because we try to exceed their expectations,” he said.
Last year, said Nel, a guest from the UK forked out more than R1-million for three weeks in the hotel’s presidential suite, where the room temperature had to be freezing cold.
“He said 16°C was not cold enough, and that was how he lives. We had to put mobile units in the room to cool it even further.”
Nel said that when celebrities booked accommodation, their personal assistants sent requests “for all sorts of things — like Fiji water, which is imported — and [which] they don’t even use sometimes”.
When one guest asked for a special chicken dish that was not on the menu, the chef spent hours cooking it only to find it was for the pet dog.
“Imagine how the chef felt. He put his heart into preparing that dish,” said Nel.
Being a pet-friendly establishment, The 12 Apostles was once asked for a babysitter to watch over a pet parrot in the room while the guest was out. “We had to get a staff member who was not afraid of parrots.”
Other requests included flying and landing on top of Table Mountain, and a guest arriving with a Great Dane after saying her dog was “medium-sized”. Another sent food back because their “dog did not like it because it was not freshly prepared”.
A guest at Centurion Lake, one of Legacy’s exclusive hotels in Pretoria, called reception asking for someone to flush the toilet in his room as he did not want to see his own faeces.
“You cannot tell the guest, ‘No’. Someone from housekeeping was called to flush the toilet. You sometimes have to react as if it is a normal request,” said Jacky Makhobedu, Centurion Lake’s guest relations officer.
Another request made by a Legacy Hotel guest was for a massage therapist who would provide a “happy ending”. Makhobedu said a woman once asked a waiter to stir off the bubbles from a R1 700 bottle of Moët champagne.
They were used to weird requests, suggestions and strange happenings at Centurion Lake.
“Often people lock themselves out of their room, but when a male guest walked to reception naked to request a toothbrush, that was something unexpected, as well as a guest placing a gun on the desk and asking the receptionist to do something with it. He then took off. The security manager had to keep it in a safe until the guest fetched it days after he checked out,” said Makhobedu.
Other requests have been for 8 000 roses from Ethiopia and to bake a birthday cake in the shape of “sunburnt buttocks” sticking out of beach sand.
Wayne Coetzer, general manager of the Oyster Box Hotel in Umhlanga, said nothing surprised him anymore. “Staff take the requests in their stride. We have a saying, ‘the answer is yes, what is the question?’ We don’t say ‘no’ to a guest . . . [although] we have to sometimes say ‘no’ to certain pet requests, like snakes.
“We have been asked why we haven’t built a wall around the hotel to keep the monkeys out,” said Coetzer.
Recently the hotel had to repaint a room in bright yellow.
“It was the guest’s favourite colour. We were able to meet their request as we were painting the room anyway.
“We were once asked if we would wrap a Bentley in gift wrap as a gift for a guest. This proved impossible as the paper had to be attached to the vehicle. We did, however, cover the entire car in red velvet,” he said.
The hotel’s executive chef, Kevin Joseph, was asked for white truffles on scrambled eggs for breakfast. The truffles, which are extremely costly, had to be imported from London for the British guest.