Haute hotels make hospitality miracles happen every day chance, somebody, miracles, expected

tiffiant

Haute hotels make hospitality miracles happen every day
If you travel a lot, it happens that you are expected to keep a list of dream destinations. Friends are understandably curious to learn where somebody fortunate enough to have visited a fair number of places would voluntarily go if given the chance. It surprises people, then, to learn that where I would most like to be is often a great hotel.
Over the course of three decades I have put up in ratholes and sojourned in five-star hotels whose names fall on the ear like music: Claridge's, Halekulani, Raffles, Grand Hotel d'Angkor. Most typically I have been in the latter class of lodgings on someone else's dime.
I am in such a place now, propped up in bed on a high floor of the Sunset Tower in Los Angeles. The book I've been pretending to read has dropped from my chest. My thoughts are occupied with nothing much beyond the thick clouds scudding down from the Hollywood Hills and a wind-borne rain that is rattling the casement windows. I have what I need, and what I don't need is 5,000 kilometres behind me in New York.
I have a weekend ahead of me and nothing more urgent in mind than to drop into the Tower Bar for a meal. I may add to my itinerary an excursion down Sunset Boulevard to Book Soup, that wonderful bibliophile's holdout. Then again, I may not.
Lingering spirits of Hollywood past
I am in what has become, after several visits, my regular room in this Art Deco tower that old-timers recall in its earlier incarnation as a place - according to the probably apocryphal tales people here tend to retail - where John Wayne once kept a cow on a terrace and Jim Morrison once tossed a television out a window into the pool.
The ghosts are gone now. The place has been shined up according to a formula devised to modernize while maintaining a through-line to an old Hollywood. The stars still come, of course. The talent will hole up in suites while taking meetings, publicizing a picture or waiting to see how big a movie opens on a holiday weekend. You can sometimes see some movie deity huddled at pool-side in a corner banquette.
But I don't come to the Sunset Tower in hope of glimpsing Johnny Depp, not really. I come, to be honest, because I'm familiar to the staff, because the maitre d'hotel lavishes guests with theatrical attention and because the waiter at lunch by now remembers that I like my Arnold Palmer made with unsweetened lemonade and replies to other re-quests I might have by saying, "My pleasure," and not the ubiquitous and hostile service-industry rejoinder "No problem."
I come because I am a student of hotel culture and I know how hard it can be to get these things right.
In hotels, secular miracles are routinely made to occur. The quotidian extravagances (costly, it's true) built into life at a decent hotel are not likely part of most people's daily existence. Here, we are only temporary citizens. And while I tip religiously and make efforts to leave my room in a decent state of order, I know that the smudge on the wall, the faulty plumbing, the nuisance of ownership belong to someone else. I bring my own baggage but leave the usual problems behind.
Long after forgetting the monuments and landmarks of Tokyo or even what it was that brought me there in the first place, I can with no trouble summon an image of the "amenities" provided at the Park Hyatt, the hotel in which Bill Murray's lost soul encountered Scarlett Johansson's in Lost in Translation.
I remember a crackle-glazed platter left on a low coffee table to greet a dehydrated and jet-lagged guest on arrival. In its centre was a kind of ikebana arrangement - one artful stem of perfectly ripened cherry tomatoes and, beside it, a mound of sea salt in a small ceramic bowl.
My affinity for hotels runs deep and is lifelong. The long, vacant corridors, the sense of hidden workings, the shops selling Lilliputian sundries for the convenience of the forgetful, the monogrammed matchbooks, the old-fashioned bath mats stamped with an establishment's name all feel familiar. It amuses more than annoys me that "Do Not Disturb" is a universally empty injunction. (In places like India, in fact, it is usually interpreted to mean: "Please enter immediately and bring every person you have ever met.")
Feeling displaced, and loving it
Unlike the characters in Lost in Translation, I relish feeling simultaneously somewhere and nowhere.
But, like any rational person, I enter even the most posh lodgings alert to the fact that I am in a bio-sphere rich in other people's DNA. I am aware that the bed may have cooled just moments before my arrival, and I know by now to ditch the bedspread, as the gossip columnist Cindy Adams once put it with jaunty crassness, "That thing has seen more action than Kim Kardashian."

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Doubtless, this is as true of the fabled Oriental in Bangkok as it is of a Best Western in Gallup, N.M., and it is certainly the case that I feel lucky to have stayed at both.

It is a privilege to be able to riff with well-off acquaintances about the relative merits of the Ritz or the Bristol in Paris. Yet while I've been spoiled and content in those luxurious settings, I was seldom happier in them than I was the summer I spent writing a script for an indie movie in a parking lot motel in New Mexico.

There is more to hotel life, of course, than maid service and ready access to a 24-hour ice machine. There are the innkeepers, for example. Few are as heroic as Karambir Singh Kang, the general manager of the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai, India, who rescued guests while his own wife and children perished in the 2008 terrorist attacks.

This all seems far off now as I putter around my room at the Sunset Tower, watching wind shred confetti petals from the bougainvillea on a small terrace. If, despite the familiar warm welcome that greets me each time I enter the lobby here, I do not feel precisely at home, I am anyhow relieved of the worries that come with being a transient.

That, too, is something I've come to value about hotel stays: how in the accustomed rituals and formalities of arrival and departure, each visit mimics a larger journey. We arrive and go to our rooms and feel relief when the key works so that we can unpack and greet our identities again. We unfold the clothes that we prepared for a temporary imagined future. And in that transition - the span between check-in and check-out - we are liberated from the un-comfortable truth that, sooner than anyone likes to imagine, the trip has ended and the time has come to pay the bill.

stay and play like the experts

See the third room first: It's anyone's guess why the first room that check-in clerks invariably offer is the cubbyhole with a romantic view of the air handling system. No matter how travel fatigued, I make it a point to apply the advice of a friend with decades of international travel experience. "Show me the third room first," this woman says at check-in, telegraphing a willingness to keep at it until she's offered a room she likes.

Empty the mini-bar: Years ago a friend who had recently got sober mentioned his habit of phoning hotels ahead with instructions to empty the mini-bar. For him, the ranks of toylike bottles were apparently too much to resist, but anyone who wants to stash provisions can do the same. (Unless, that is, you are stuck with a computerized refrigerator, which automatically bills you if you happen to jostle a bottle of V-8.) Many hotels concede that guests looking to avoid recidivist lapses or a $30 tab for mini-bar cashews have a right to a fridge with empty shelves. I call ahead and ask.

Declutter: Some people are driven nuts by visual clutter. I am one. So it shocks me in other people's hotel rooms to find they organize themselves around the usual welter of magazines, flyers, hotel guides and pesky plaques nagging guests about checkout or how to save the planet by reusing their towels. The first 10 minutes spent in any hotel room are dedicated to sweeping away junk. Into a drawer it all goes (and out it comes again before checkout; no fair leaving a housekeeper with that task).

Remove the unsightly: Few travellers realize how accommodating hotels can be of seemingly eccentric demands. One perennial problem in hotel rooms is too much furniture. A few dollars and a call to housekeeping will usually solve the problem. Hoteliers I have spoken to about this said they had readily obliged guest requests by having chairs removed, beds replaced, rugs hauled out and, yes, even the terrible art taken down from the walls. It is an eccentricity of mine, but wherever possible I give a heave-ho to the TV.

Swab: The late Carol Matthau had an idiosyncratic though sane approach to hotel sanitation: She would swab the place down with Fracas, her favourite perfume. Somewhere between that solution and taking an ultraviolet wand to the CSI crime scene that is an average room, there must be a solution. As a merely moderate germaphobe I travel with antiseptic wipes and use them to sanitize at least the sketchier surfaces: doorknobs, telephones, that always-dicey remote wand.

Quarantine the bedspread: You know a hotel room has an issue when a rock star flags it. It was in an interview I once read with Ronnie Wood that I first encountered the truth that, while hotels change bed sheets with regularity, bedspreads are less often refreshed. Who knows how much action those things have seen? Never mind. Into the closet it goes
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tiffiant

I make it a point to apply the advice of a friend with decades of international travel experience. "Show me the third room first," this woman says at check-in, telegraphing a willingness to keep at it until she's offered a room she likes.

The magic effected in hotels can be as particular as that or a standard element of the hospitality.