From demanding superstars to mice on the skirting boards, a new insider book exposes the five-star industry, writes Arminta Wallace
It had been a long day. I'd been travelling forever. I was due on a red-eye flight back to Dublin the next morning and was booked into one of those cavernous hotels near Heathrow for the night. I checked in, hauled my suitcase for miles and finally opened a door, expecting to find the usual bland set-up: bedroom, bathroom, minibar, television with instructions on how to use the adult channels and one of those enormous mahogany desks that make you feel you should be running Microsoft instead of taking a shower and collapsing into bed. But I wasn't about to collapse into this bed. It wasn't just unmade; it was all over the place. Towels were strewn everywhere, and the bathroom floor, inexplicably, was adorned with large quantities of Pringles crisps.
An apologetic - although not, it struck me even in my befuddled state, unduly surprised - receptionist gave me a "junior suite" with an even bigger mahogany desk, a complimentary drink from the minibar and a free breakfast. But I've never felt the same about hotels since. The hotel business is an illusion, and the illusion, once shattered, is shattered for ever. So if you still cherish the idea that hotels are orderly, immaculate places devoted to your well-being, don't read Hotel Babylon, a new book written by Imogen Edwards-Jones and Anonymous. Edwards-Jones is a journalist, broadcaster and author of such previous exposés as My Canapé Hell and Shagpile. Anonymous is the manager of a five-star central-London hotel who has worked in just about every big-name hostelry in the British capital for the past 15 years. Between them they don't just shatter the illusion, they blow it out of the water.
Many of the tales they have to tell, as you would expect, involve guests behaving badly. Sex in those corridors is, apparently, not unusual; nor is it out of the ordinary for room-service staff to be set upon by people who want much, much more than just a club sandwich of an evening. The moment of reckoning often arrives at the checkout desk next morning. One man ran up a €1,300 phone bill by dialling sex chat lines - not as difficult as you might think when hotels charge a whopping €15 a minute for premium-line calls.
More worrying, though, are the unexpected-guest stories, which tend to involve homeless men, prostitutes and vermin. According to Hotel Babylon, all three are endemic in the upper echelons of the hotel industry - and the prostitutes appear to be the most difficult to get rid of. "Once the bloke has gone off to his meeting in the city or wherever he is supposed to be," grumbles Anonymous, "they start thinking they're in bloody Pretty Woman." He is adamant that one venerable establishment that backs on to the River Thames - OK, the Savoy - is "crawling" with rats, and he swears that, while serving afternoon tea at Claridge's, he has seen mice dancing along the skirting boards.
Then there are the mistakes and misunderstandings. In the early hours of one morning, while working an exhausting double shift at reception, he receives a phone call from a female guest who sounds frightened. A man has been trying to get into her room for the past half-hour, she says. "Hurry up. Please. Room 306."
Anonymous dashes to the rescue. Lurking in a third-floor corridor is not a leather-clad pervert but a small, naked, extremely embarrassed man. It turns out that he got up to go to the loo, inadvertently walked out of the main room door and, to his horror, heard it close behind him. "And now, no matter how hard I knock, my wife won't wake up." Room number? "Three-o-eight."
When it comes to behaving really badly, of course, you can rely on celebrities, and not just the rock bands that regularly trash bedrooms, bars and reception areas. Hotels actually welcome those, as they clean up - literally as well as metaphorically - on the insurance claims afterwards. No, ratty requests are more the order of the day with famous folk.
Before Cher came to stay at St Martins Lane hotel a boatload of organic food was brought in specially, as well as a large quantity of expensive gym equipment. She walked into the reception area, said something along the lines of "this place is a fish bowl" and walked right out to find another hotel.
Richard Gere criticised the spotty carpets at the Hyde Park Hotel, so a suite was refurbished for him at horrendous expense. He never stayed there again. Michael Jackson requested that 48 bottles of Evian water be poured into his bath at the Lanesborough - resulting, to the staff's mystification, in a bath half-full of cold mineral water. What, they wondered, was he going to do with it? Get in and add hot water from the tap? Before you start to sympathise too much with long-suffering hoteliers, however, pause for a moment to reflect on some of their profit margins.
Mid-morning coffee and biscuits, which will set you back upwards of €15 plus service, allegedly cost less than 15 cent a person to produce. Those stands of fancy sandwiches and cakes that hotels call afternoon tea cost about €3 to make. Your bill? A cool €40. A 60 cent bottle of mineral water goes for €5 in the bar . . . and so on, and so on. Hotel rooms themselves, says Anonymous, cost less than €20 a day to turn around, broken down as follows: clean sheets and towels, €4.50; newspapers, €1; heat, light, wear, tear and theft, €1.75; wages for the chambermaid, €2; cleaning products, 60 cent; bathroom supplies, €2.40; truffles to go on your pillow at night, €5. "Knowing this, quite how we can get away with charging £2,000 \ a suite a night is beyond me," he says, although it clearly isn't beyond him at all. Money, of course, is what makes the hotel business go round. If you've got lots of it you can get away with pretty much anything. Those snooty concierges who look the other way when they see you coming, or pretend they don't understand what you're asking about, take a very different tack if you tuck a £50 (€75) note into their top pocket.
On Planet Hotel a perverse kind of racism applies. Arab guests are at the top of the socio-political pile, thanks to their penchant for cigars, caviar and €1,000-a-shot brandy. The predominantly Arabic-speaking night cleaners are at the bottom. One night Anonymous finds one fast asleep in the insalubrious staff toilets. He coughs, and the man jumps up, terrified: " 'Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,' he repeats, panic-stricken, like I'm about to hit him or fire him." The cleaner apologises profusely for his mistake; he has been working day shifts in a hotel in Bayswater as well, he says, for more than a year. Back home in Iraq he was a doctor.
If you think that's nauseating, check out the Hotel Babylon attitude to pre-theatre diners: "Cord-clad dullards. . . . We try to knock out the theatre food and get them in and out as quickly as possible, pretending that it has something to do with getting them there before curtain-up."
Or polite Japanese businessmen. When the hotel is overbooked - as it almost always is, explains Anonymous, helpfully - repeat customers are usually looked after, as are people who have booked through a travel agency (to keep the agency, not the customer, sweet). "The lone traveller, here for one night, is always the first to go. It is always the single Japanese businessman who gets bumped."
Leafing through these pages, you quickly get a handle on some of the dos and don'ts of staying in hotels. For a start, never book an early check-in. It's one of the hotel trade's favourite scams. You pay in advance for the night; they score a double whammy by booking you into a room that has had somebody else sleeping in it; if that person doesn't get out in time - tough luck. You'll be left sitting high and dry in the restaurant, where breakfast isn't even being served yet, to wait it out.
Never, ever use hotel dry-cleaning services, which are, to quote Anonymous, to be avoided like a cold sore. And never, ever, ever seek out room service after 10 p.m. By this time of night hotel kitchens have metamorphosed into something resembling the seventh circle of hell, with a porter mopping the floor with bleach while exhausted chefs tramp blood and vegetable peelings back over the bits he has supposedly just cleaned.
Do, by all means, put out your breakfast hanger. It's supposed to be on your door by 11.30 p.m. "But we never come and collect them until around 4.30 a.m.," comes the jaunty assurance from Anonymous. "Just so long as you get your hanger out before dawn, I guarantee you'll get your breakfast." Always supposing that, having read his book, you've got a strong enough stomach to eat it.
Hotel Babylon: The Decadence And The Debauchery Of The Ultimate Service Industry, by Imogen Edwards-Jones and Anonymous, is published by Bantam Press, 12.99 in UK
