3. THE UPGRADE · WEEKLY · What luxury hotels get wrong
What luxury hotels get wrong, an interview with the Managing Director for the Lanesborough in London, and the hotel pipeline is an at all-time high
🗝 The Upgrade · Weekly by Anne Marie Brown
In this week’s The Upgrade:
• Pre-Departure – What Luxury Hotels Get Wrong
• The Room Report – The Lanesborough, London (interview with the Managing Director)
• The Lobby Bar – Industry Updates (the hotel pipeline is at an all-time high)
Travelers,
I spend a lot of my time on hotels, touring them, reading about them, sleeping in them, listening to sales presentations in hotel ballrooms while nursing a cup of mediocre coffee. It blows my mind that a property can invest millions in its product and still get simple aspects of service wrong.
Happy travels, Anne Marie Co-Founder, Alpenglow Travel
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🗝️ Pre-Departure – Hospitality Industry Hot Takes
What Luxury Hotels Get Wrong
Give me a martini, and I’ll wax poetic about hotels. Brands pour millions into the design, the press coverage, the sales director dinner with agents in their territories, and then drop the ball on service in ways that are completely avoidable.
The 1 Hotel in Hanalei is a good example. It’s a gorgeous property with an unbeatable location on Kauai. I had it on my personal must-see list. Then, the reports came in from fellow advisors and our clients: forgotten room service, housekeeping arriving mid-afternoon, slow pool service, concierge that responded with crickets. I stopped recommending it.
Part of my job is meeting annually with hotel sales directors and asking hard questions. These are the pet peeves that I see repeatedly ruining otherwise 5-star stays.
You never have to play The Chair Game at Four Seasons Naviva
1. The Chair Game
You peruse row after row of chairs after breakfast, heart sinking as you realize every single chair has a book, pair of sunglasses, or unfolded towel thrown haphazardly over it. You vow to wake up early tomorrow and claim your real estate before the other guests.
If you are paying upwards of $1,000 a night, you should not be setting an alarm for the poolside hotel hunger games.
Grand Velas Los Cabos handles this well: you give your name and room number when you claim a chair, which will be held for 30 minutes before items are removed if your chair remains unoccupied. Most importantly, they actually enforce this.
2. Light Switches That Require a Degree
There is an inverse relationship between a guest’s ability to turn on a light and the hotel ADR (average daily rate).
During a recent stay at the One & Only Mandarina, my family spent every evening in semi-darkness because we could not figure out the lighting panels. On our last day, we discovered a skylight with its own switch which had been there the entire time. Let there be (more) light.
3. Charging for Water at the Restaurant
Our hotel folio at a certain 5-star in Cabo had astronomical restaurant bills. The culprit was bottled water charges at every meal. We started smuggling plastic bottles from the room, which made my environmentally conscious heart die a little. If the tap water is unsuitable for guests, bottled water at on-property dining venues should be included.
4. Slow Pre-Arrival Communication
I work with hotel concierges constantly, coordinating welcome amenities, booking restaurants, arranging transfers. Legacy concierges are worth their weight in gold. When a hotel takes three days to reply to an email and answers only half my questions, I know they aren’t taking the advisor relationship seriously.
In contrast, you have the concierge team at the Lanesborough, who are on it. They reach out proactively, they remember my clients, they provide service you didn’t even know you needed. Recently, they sourced sold-out V&A Marie Antoinette exhibit tickets for a client, and that won them my business until the end of time.
5. Housekeeping After 1pm
I worked housekeeping for two summers at my family’s hotels. A well-staffed team does not need until 3pm to turn a room. We travel with kids who are up at 6am, eat breakfast early, and want to be back in the room by noon. Returning to an unmade room when you want clean sheets and towels for a shower is disheartening. The Amans of the world notice you’ve gone to breakfast and turn the room without being asked.
What You Said
I asked my network for their hotel pet peeves:
• Waiting 90 minutes for luggage they insisted on bringing to your room (Hotel Arts Barcelona holds this record in my personal experience)
• A long check-in spiel after 12 hours of travel with screaming children – I don’t need to know about “Star Gazer” lounge access
• Missing check-in time and not making up for it
• Slow pool service
• Resort and destination fees
• Exorbitant laundry pricing
• Not enough hangers
• Hidden outlets, or none by the bed
What Others Are Saying
• Gina Jackson, a London-based hotel writer whose work appears in Conde Nast Traveller, The Times, and the Evening Standard, recently published her own take on hotel pet peeves, and a few of her points are worth adding to the conversation.
• Expensive yet boring minibars. Gina makes a strong case that minibars should be complimentary. She points to Heckfield Place restocking daily with house-made biscuits and cordials, and NIHI Sumba personalizing the minibar entirely based on a pre-arrival preferences form.
• Non-alcoholic options that are actually worth ordering. This one I hadn’t thought enough about, but Gina is right. A hotel with a thoughtful wine program but just two token mocktails is failing to serve a meaningful portion of its guests.
• A general lack of generosity. Gina’s broader point is one I think about a lot: when a hotel is charging four figures a night and nickel and diming its guests, even the most affluent travelers feel taken advantage of.
🗝️ The Room Report - Personal reviews from my own travels
A love letter to my favorite hotel in London, a luxury hotel that gets it right
The Lanesborough, London
When clients ask for a London recommendation, I always land on the Lanesborough. I studied abroad in London, fly through Heathrow whenever I can, and have sent enough clients there to know exactly what they’re getting.
The service is unlike anywhere else I’ve been. When my clients tested positive for Covid mid-stay, Sameer (the Sales Director) and the team upgraded them to a suite so they could sleep in separate rooms, sent soup up, and arranged for a doctor. When I brought my daughter, Malia, for her 7th birthday, we arrived at a room with a teepee full of books, a stuffed cat (she loves the hotel cat, Lilibet), a tea party set up for her doll, and enough treats to make Marie Antoinette swoon.
My daughter, Malia, with the Lanesborough cat, Lilibet
The lobby bar is my favorite haunt in the city: tableside martinis with blue cheese olives, piano at night, a bartender who remembers your name, and a crowd that’s half guests and half locals.
Managing Director of the Lanesborough, Stuart Geddes, sat down with us for a hotel highlight interview.
Read it here: The Lanesborough: Alpenglow Interviews Stuart Geddes
🗝️ The Lobby Bar - Hospitality updates, promotions, and the occasional pun
The Hotel Pipeline Is at an All-Time High
With the Middle Eastern conflict, I’m frequently asked about the state of travel in our industry at the moment.
Nadine at The Stanza shared the following data that I will now be writing on a cocktail napkin and producing from my purse when asked this question.
Per Lodging Econometrics, the global hotel pipeline just hit a record: nearly 16,000 projects and 2.4 million rooms in development worldwide. The growth is concentrated in luxury and premium categories, now the fastest-growing segments globally. Developers are building more rooms, and those rooms are more expensive.
Hotel conversion projects are up 13% from last year, also an all-time high, which tells us that the supply of sites that lend themselves to a true luxury property is finite. You can’t manufacture a clifftop on the Pacific or a palazzo on a Venetian canal, you have to take it over and rebrand it. Developers are responding by repositioning existing buildings under stronger flags rather than building from scratch.
What this means for travelers: more new luxury inventory is coming, but the truly singular properties will only get harder to access and more expensive to book.
What are your hotel pet peeves?
To book any hotel, visit our Booking Portal or email Info@alpenglowtravel.com.
🗝️Anne Marie
Ah, agree with all of these! The pool chair game (wrote an article on that), the light switches (been there), and afternoon housekeeping (not great for nap times)… so many insights!!
Comparing other hotels to the Lanesborough is unfair to other hotels!