Hotels display room for improvement
I am bamboozled by the number of hotels that try so hard to achieve so little.
What do we all miss about hotels? Several readers recently have posed this question. Others have advised what they don’t miss. I am just bamboozled how so many properties try so hard to achieve so little.
Where does it go wrong? It’s the little things, and by that I don’t mean scale but lack of consideration and too much smart-arse technology.
Take the disappearance of the digital bedside clock. Designers have decided we all have Smartphones and can lean idly across in the night and check the time on that tiny screen. In their perfect world, nobody is shortsighted and would need to find their spectacles on the side table, resulting in the dislocation of same on to the floor, at best, and underfoot, at worst.
Then there are those dinky magnifying mirrors over the ensuite basin. These used to pop out on swizzle arms but the latest models, with their eerie illuminated surrounds, are fixed. And make that stuck solid at a certain height that is always much higher than my dial. The hotel collateral will describe said amenity as a “make-up mirror”. Making that up, more likely. They are for blokes of average height to use to shave. They are as far away from the edge of the basin as it’s possible to be. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
Much has been written (not just by me) about that one light that won’t turn off. This dilemma has mostly been solved by the introduction of the crafty master switch. But in many cases it will be by the guestroom door so, if it’s bedtime, that means after switching it off, you’ll be in the dark. Hopefully you’ll have remembered to carry your Smartphone and can use its torch function to find the bed, weaving like a glow-worm around the furniture. Oops, just tripped over that pointless ottoman or the towelling slippers by the bed. The fantasy persists that all guests think it’s cool to shuffle about as if we’re in a Japanese bathhouse.
Amenities? Maybe Covid has put paid to all the nonsense about extras such as fruit baskets. Whoever felt grateful for a hard brown pear or a floury apple dressed up in cellophane? Give us sweet indulgences we can scoff greedily and unobserved. Not Turkish delight, though, as white trails of icing sugar could attract suspicion. I worked through an entire platter of rosewater Turkish delight in a suite at an Istanbul hotel and housekeeping surely had me pegged as a cocaine dealer by day three. Midnight Express? Heck, no, but could the 24-hour room service team deliver a “midnight owl express club sandwich” inside the promised 20 minutes?
You already know the answer.