Hotel bugbears – and

Travel

How not to run a hotel

My bugbears – and my dream hotels, by insider Jeremy Wayne

Ilove good hotels. Who doesn’t? Clean, crisp sheets, bath towels the size of sails, hot and cold running room service – what can possibly be bad? Well, quite a lot, as it happens.

My standards are simple and scrupulously fair. A hotel must be at least as comfortable as my own house, which is a pretty low bar since my house isn’t especially comfortable.

But even the shabbiest home has advantages over the grandest hotel. At home, you know where the light switches are. You know the direction to turn the taps to make the shower water hot. Plus you have the ability to fix yourself a drink or rustle up a sandwich, any time of the day or night, with the minimum of fuss and without it costing an arm and a leg.

Hotels, while they can obviously spoil you, can also irritate you in equal measure. Here, then, are my top hotel bugbears – and some hotels where such headaches are never likely to occur.

1. The googling concierge

‘Concierge’ and ‘Google’ are two nouns that should never be used in the same phrase or sentence; their functions are entirely separate.

The first is a hotel professional, a repository of essential information. Part-human encyclopedia, partconnoisseur, the perfect hotel concierge pairs his ability to ‘read’ the guest with intimate local knowledge.

How many times have I asked a hotel concierge for a nugget of local intel – a barber shop, a florist, a train time – only to have him start tapping on his keyboard? These days, all travellers have smartphones – so any fool can google.

We need an informed opinion, a point

Always check the shower: Bates Motel of view, an original recommendation or a secret hideaway – something we can’t discover for ourselves.

Daniel Bethel, head concierge at the beautifully restored Cadogan Hotel, London (belmond.com), where Lillie Langtry once held court and from where, in 1895, Oscar Wilde was arrested in room 118, is not a googler. A member of Les Clefs d’Or, the association of elite concierges, for 19 years, he has a ‘black book’ of restaurant directors, doctors and museum curators. He can arrange an engagement party in the square (complete with string quartet) in no time or rustle up a private jet within a couple of hours, should you need one, all without googling.

2. The sensor-activated minibar

You know the set-up: the hotel minibar that automatically charges you when you remove – or even, in some cases, merely touch – an item, regardless of whether or not you consume it. Look to see whether the label on that bottle of water says ‘still’ or ‘fizzy’, or remove a can of Coke to make space for your own bottle of milk or perhaps contact-lens solution, and find on departure that an additional 98 euros has been mysteriously added

to your bill. Talk about minibar – more of a mini-minefield, I’d say.

The Ace, New Orleans (acehotel. com), doesn’t do minibars as we know and hate them. It does a full-size Smeg refrigerator in jaunty lime green. It’s crammed with five kinds of whisky as well as other spirits, three kinds of house-distilled vermouth and bitters and at least two tons of chocolate. Not a sensor in sight – you pay for what you consume on an honesty basis. The first Ace Hotel I came across was in New Orleans. There are now 20 of these beauties, with Kyoto and Sydney the most recent openings.

3. Baffling technology

I’m no Luddite – no journalist can afford to be. But touch screens, impenetrable lighting layouts and electrically operated curtains in my hotel room all drive me nuts. I like to turn the lights on and off with a simple on/off switch and open and close the curtains with my own two hands. I don’t like blue light, LED displays or anything in the room that beeps, buzzes or otherwise wakes or startles me.

Nestled in the pines above a partsandy, part-rocky beach in a crook in the glorious bay of Palma, the wellestablished Hotel Bendinat, Palma de Mallorca (hotelbendinat.es), is a celebration of old-fashioned comfort. Light switches are where you expect them to be and have only two positions – on and off. The heavy curtains draw easily, and the TV (not that you’ll ever want to watch it) is straightforward to operate. I don’t think there can be a more comfortable or relaxing hotel in the entire Mediterranean.

4. Noise

I like peace and quiet in my hotel room. I’m not going to complain about a Saturday-night dance in the dining room with a small orchestra playing Bésame Mucho or Strangers in the Night, the sounds wafting up to my room – rather lovely, in fact. As long as it’s over by midnight. But the hotel gardener sabotaging the siesta hour with his growling lawnmower, or local youths revving their Vespas outside the window at three in the morning, these can wreck any hotel stay.

Built as a private villa in the late-19th century by the English admiral Cecil Domville, with a magnificent view over the bay of Palermo, the exquisite Grand Hotel Villa Igiea (roccofortehotels. com), has beautiful bedrooms (thank you, Olga Polizzi) that are so quiet you could swear you were the only guest. Whether there’s a wedding for 400 people in full swing in the hotel’s splendiferous Belle Époque ballroom, or the couple in the next room are going at it hammer and tongs, fear not: you will never hear a sound.

5. Music that offends

I rather like music in hotel lobbies. Oscar Peterson on the piano, say, or the silky purr of Acker Bilk’s clarinet – these can give any lobby an air of gentle sophistication.

My issue is with loud music, or any music that impinges on human conversation. Please, hoteliers, no Guns N’ Roses at breakfast – in fact, no vocals whatsoever before midday.

Worst of all – inappropriate music. At an otherwise lovely hotel in Provence last year, sunbathing by the delicious swimming pool, I was subjected to the following rap assault on my ears: ‘I’m looking up north while you touching down south.’ And those were some of the tamer lyrics.

At the Kimpton St Honoré, Paris (kimptonsthonoreparis.com), the zingy new ‘boutique’ hotel from the InterContinental group on the site of the former 1917 La Samaritaine department store, diagonally opposite L’Opéra, they get the music absolutely right. In the hotel’s Montecito Café, there’s extra light, barely audible jazz. At the bar on the hotel’s wonderful rooftop terrace and garden, with a view of the Eiffel Tower, you’ll (just about) hear Charles Aznavour warbling La Baraka or Françoise Hardy mouthing Find Me a Boy or All Over the World. Heaven.

6. Water babies

I love children – although I can never manage a whole one. I really do love them. Nice well-behaved ones, for preference, although the odd rascal can be quite endearing too. What I don’t love is what happens when children come into contact with water – specifically swimming pools. Suddenly, all restraint and awareness of others evaporate.

If you ever get inveigled into taking your grandchildren to Disney World, the first thing I want to say is, ‘I’m sorry.’ The second is that there’s a panacea: the

Four Seasons Resort Orlando

(fourseasons.com). This lovely property, large by Four Seasons standards but intimate by Orlando ones, has a five-acre children’s water park, complete with ‘splash zone’. It also has a dreamy adults-only pool and sanctuary, aptly named Oasis, where children – no matter how winsome their smiles – are never admitted by the professional, well-drilled Four Seasons staff.

Avoid the Fawlty School of Management Jeremy Wayne was restaurant editor of

Tatler and the Guardian. He advises hotels in the

Relais & Châteaux group