Luxury Let-Downs
I’ve tried to write this post about luxury hotels four times now, but I keep getting the feeling that it’s a bit pedantic. Nit-picky. A whole seven minutes (ish) of your precious time that will be taken up with my luxury hotel gripes. Life’s too short! Let it go! It’s all first world problems of the highest order anyway!
But then, I thought, no. If nobody ever calls out these things, the overpriced restaurants serving reheated frozen food, the fancy resorts charging a fortune for sub-par experiences, then will anything ever change? And what about the people who will spend their hard-earned cash and come away disappointed? Do we owe it to the people after us to firmly, yet politely, voice our concerns when it comes to value and quality?
After all, it’s not just the yacht-owning banknote-flinging minority who are booking these hotels and restaurants and resorts, I’d hazard a guess that a huge percentage of the guests are people who are treating themselves to what might be the holiday of a lifetime, or the one-off ultra-special anniversary meal. There’s a lot of expectation and emotional energy involved when you’re spending way out of your comfort zone - I now know this from much, much experience!
Picture it: you’ve saved up for a romantic weekend away at a hotel that looks as though it represents the absolute pinnacle of indulgent luxury; you’ve splashed out on the room size above the one that looks like a broom cupboard, you’ve come to terms with the fact that the price you’re paying doesn’t even include breakfast. You’ve justified the whole thing by reasoning that you only live once, you’ve had a tough year, the tyres on the car will surely last another few hundred miles if you drive very, very carefully.
And it’s going to be amazing! Nobody would pay those kinds of prices for a hotel room if it wasn’t simply the best place that had ever existed! Would they? I mean, you get what you pay for, right?
Not always.
Here are some of the luxury hotels I’ve stayed in over the past few years and the things that have let the whole experience down. They might seem rather petty, on paper, but each time the annoyance and then the feeling of disappointment really spoiled the ambience:
