Hotel News
Hope You Enjoyed Your Stay, Sir. Now Give Us Back Our TV
Enjoy this article by Mark Palmer. It seems sarcastic.. but that's the reality that every hotel has to face.
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Article By Mark Palmer
We are a nation of thieves. Every morning, in hotels up and down the country, guests are walking off with hundreds of pounds worth of household items - and we're not talking about the odd bottle of shampoo, bath caps or body lotion.
In one London hotel there's been a run on espresso coffee machines and iPod docking stations, while the Malmaison in Birmingham recently discovered that a flat-screen television had gone missing.
High on the list of items routinely slipped into suitcases are coat-hangers, umbrellas, bath robes, hairdryers, towels, flannels, leather folders and pens and pads of paper galore.
So it is little wonder that a company has invented a microchip which, when sewn into a towel or dressing gown, alerts the hotel if the item leaves the premises. Hotels can then charge the guest's credit card.
William Serbin, whose firm sells the trackable linen, says up to 20 per cent of towels and gowns hotels put in their rooms goes missing. A towel with a chip costs about 60p more and the tags can be read by sensors up to 6ft away.
The tags last for more than 300 wash cycles and have been so successful in U.S. hotels that their British counterparts are sure to take up the idea.
One large, beachside hotel in Honolulu has reported a saving of £10,000 a month on bath and swimming pool towels stolen by guests.
So, what are you entitled to from your hotel after you've paid the bill? The truth is that there is little agreement within the hotel fraternity - and even less among guests.
For many, half the point of staying in an expensive hotel is the chance to take home nice, complimentary souvenirs. This includes even the wealthiest of guests.
Film legend Marlene Dietrich had a habit of nicking the silver salt and pepper pots and cutlery delivered to her room at The Savoy in London with her breakfast and putting them in her suitcase.
The hotel's staff would unpack her suitcase and remove everything she had taken - only to go through the same ritual the next morning.
Dietrich wasn't the only star with kleptomaniac tendencies. Derek Picot, a veteran hotel general manager, worked at The Savoy when Sir John Gielgud was a regular.
‘Sir John was in the habit of pinching hangers,' Derek recalls. ‘I don't know why. He'd leave with several in his bag. We never said anything, but we did make a note each time he stayed of how many he had stolen in case it ever got out of hand.'
But what can a hotel do when the situation does get out of hand? By the time housekeeping reports that the TV has gone missing, the guest might be miles away.
‘It's a tricky one,' says a spokeswoman for the Kempinski group, which has 62 hotels worldwide. ‘You can call the guest and tell him that he might have walked off with something, but he can just deny it and then it's not worth pursuing.'
David Taylor, general manager of The Hoxton Hotel in Shoreditch, East London, knows this only too well. When he was working at the Great Eastern Hotel, near Liverpool Street Station in London, he contacted a banker and told him that some things were missing from the room in which he had just stayed - only to receive a letter from his lawyers accusing the hotel of casting aspersions on their client's integrity.
Tact is required when a hotel wants to charge a guest for missing goods.
One hotel manager's line of inquiry goes like this: ‘We notice you may have taken a liking to our bath robes or you might accidentally have packed them in your suitcase, so I hope you won't mind us charging your credit card.' What he really means is: ‘We've caught you red-handed, you squalid little crook.'
It would seem that the smarter a hotel is, the more guests feel entitled to smuggle out goodies.
Mr Picot, now working at the five-star Jumeirah Carlton Tower in central London, received a letter from a guest a few weeks ago, full of praise for a wonderful stay that she and her husband had enjoyed in the capital.
‘Then at the end she said: "The towels were so gorgeous and fluffy that we could hardly fit them into our suitcases," ' says Mr Picot. Towels are small fry. At the Grand Hotel des Bains, in St Moritz, one woman was caught stealing a giant clock. The hotel's spokesman said: ‘An American couple visited us to celebrate their wedding anniversary. The wife went to the spa and afterwards we noticed that a big silver clock, approximately 28x20in and mounted to the wall, was missing.
‘We found the clock in the woman's suitcase. Her husband was shocked.' If it's raining and there's an umbrella in a plush hotel room, the chances are it will never be seen again.
On the other hand, fly Virgin Upper Class and it is actually assumed that passengers will steal the salt and pepper pots. Helpfully, they have the words ‘Nicked from Virgin Upper Class' on the bottom!
But some places positively encourage theft as a valuable marketing opportunity.
In each bathroom at the £250-a-night Stafford Hotel in London's Mayfair is a little yellow plastic duck. These are almost always taken by guests, but the management is only too pleased that they will be swimming in the guests' baths at home - with the hotel's name and logo emblazoned on the ducks' breasts.
Similarly, toiletries aren't an issue. ‘We genuinely encourage our guests to take away our shampoos and soaps,' says David Taylor. ‘It's like a little piece of us going home with them. In fact, our soaps come in a box that says: "Keep my box, take me home." ' One hotel manager even said he was ‘perfectly relaxed' about guests absconding with bath robes ‘as long as they have our logo on them'.
Robert Cook, chief executive of the Hotel du Vin chain of boutique hotels, also says he likes branded products leaving with guests, but grows weary of people helping themselves to the mini-bar and not paying. ‘We still see quite a bit of the old trick of people drinking the vodka and refilling the empty with water, but we try to be relaxed about it,' he says. ‘We want to trust our guests as much as possible.'
That trust must have been stretched somewhat when, a few years ago, Mr Cook heard about the disappearance of an antique coffee table from one of his hotels in Newcastle. Clearly, the pilfering guests couldn't have removed it unnoticed and must have passed themselves off as removal men as they carried the table through the crowded lobby and out the front door.
Chances are they had a couple of towels, bars of soap and bags of peanuts from the mini-bar stuffed in the drawers as additional trophies.
