HOTELS:A Canadian hotel has made a plea to former guests for the return of ill-gotten gains – with sometimes surprising results, writes BRIAN BOYD
THE GRANDLY NAMED Fairmont Chateau Laurier boasts that it “reflects the confidence, dignity and style of Canada’s capital city”.
Accommodation isn’t cheap at this “Gothic French chateau” in Ottawa, with single rooms costing between €300 and €400 a night. It’s a classy joint but has witnessed so much unclassy behaviour from its well-heeled guests over the years that it is now offering an “amnesty” so that visitors can return stolen objects. No questions asked.
To mark its 100th anniversary, the hotel’s mangers were looking at their inventory of luxury items and noticed how many of these expensive objects had seemingly made their way into the bags and cases of paying guests. This wasn’t your average bathroom towel theft – the hotel was missing countless doorknobs, menus and silverware as well as Grand Trunk cigar boxes, Grand Trunk Limoges dishware and heritage photographs.
“We’re not asking for people to return bathrobes they make have taken. We’re asking for those unique items that have never been seen before,” says Deneen Perrin, the hotel’s director of public relations.
The hotel, as much of a landmark in Ottawa as the Shelbourne would be to Dublin, has hosted luminaries such as Nelson Mandela and was originally built by the railway baron, Charles Melville Hayes who didn’t make the official opening night because he had chosen to travel to Canada on the Titanic.
Because so much history is attached to the building, the hotel wants to restore all its original furnishings, cutlery and so on. One surprise knock-on effect of their current “amnesty”, which began in February and lasts until June, is the stories that are accompanying the stolen items being returned. “We love to hear how items were obtained, but should the story be one that is better left untold, we respect the privacy of the donor or lender,” says Perrin.
Since the amnesty was announced, the hotel has received numerous items – big and small – from penitent guests. “Everyone who calls says ‘I have something but I swear I didn’t steal it’,” says Perrin. Menus, postcards, brass keys, dishware and even a silver platter with a fish server have all been returned over the last few weeks. Some items have arrived in the post with no return address given, while others have been returned in person by shamefaced former guests. A few people have discreetly dropped off items at the front desk before making a swiftly exit and one man did a “dump and run” – he pulled up in front of the hotel and handed the bellhop his items before driving off.
One elderly lady says she was “simply delayed by 50 years” in returning one of the hotel’s sterling silver ladles.
Beer steins, letter openers, teacups and antique utility knives are now all making their way back to their rightful place, and so impressed are hotel staff by the quality of the goods being returned that they will open an exhibit of all the items in June as part of a retrospective of the hotel’s rich history.
According to available data, some 61 per cent of all hotel guests take toiletries (hardly a big deal), while 18 per cent of guests take towels, 14 per cent take ashtrays and a very strange 2 per cent take bath mats. Losses can amount to hundreds of millions of euro a year, say experts, with toiletries and towels always coming out on top as the most liberated items.
However, sections of carpet, light fittings, mirrors and even curtains are also on some guests’ “shopping lists”.
Hotels usually factor such losses into their budgets and are only really concerned with that very small minority of guests who try to steal expensive artwork of even Plasma TV sets.
One hotel source, who prefers to remain anonymous, says that a regular guest at a certain hotel helped himself to an entire dinner service – one piece at a time – over a period of several months.
Surprisingly, it emerges that lightbulbs tend to disappear very often from even the more expensive hotels – they are now part of the housekeeping cart in some hotels.
A hotel in the UK reports the case of a guest trying to smuggle a €800 Aeron office chair out by using it as a luggage cart. Elsewhere, a window-mounted air-conditioning unit, a colour photocopier (from the business centre) and even the sliding doors off a wardrobe have all been stolen.
It’s a happy ending though for Ottawa’s Fairmont Chateau Laurier. Most of their historical, antique and irreplaceable items have now been returned and consciences are clear again.
The case of the missing monogrammed carpet
Hunter’s Hotel in Ashford has a sign in the garden exhorting people not to take flowers – but it would do well to have similar instructions indoors.
“We’ve had pictures taken off walls, a silver teapot lifted from the mantelpiece,” says owner Richard Gilletlie. “Among the most interesting items taken was a letter from Sir Walter Scott.”
What the guest who took the carpet from under hotelier Francis Brennan’s feet was thinking mystifies him still. “I was working in the Victoria Hotel in Cork and this massive roll of carpet disappeared. What could they have used it for? It had the hotel logo all over it.” By and large, guests at his hotel, the Park in Kenmare, are well behaved, though he recalls a well-known writer who tried to check out with a towels peeking out of a bag.
When Brennan pointed this out, he was told he needed it for his car. “But if everybody did that we’d have none,” he said, taking it back. “He gave us a bad write-up.” The item whose loss most irked him was a silver platter with his name inscribed on it. “It was personal, an award – Kilkenny Design, which no longer exists.”
Mary Bowe also had an award taken. It was given to her hotel, Marlfield House, two years after opening in 1978. “Four days later, it came back with a beautiful letter of apology. Two guys on a pub crawl took it when they were leaving and it was only when they got home that they realised.”
On one occasion, Catherine Dundon of Dunbrody House had an entire dinner service walk out.
“We had a hen and the woman’s friends loaded her bag with all the silverware they could find,” she says. A few days later, a massive package arrived, with profuse apologies. One light-fingered guest actually did her a favour. “We were given a hideous ashtray. I stuck it on the hall table and it was gone in a day. I thought, if your taste is that bad, you’re welcome to it.”
Sandra O'Connell
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