The Thoughts of Chairman May... on British Hotels Observations and experiences from the English hotel industry, or "The piece of England that passeth all understanding."

After staying in English hotels while on a working assignment in the United Kingdom for about six months in 1997, and again in 2000, I am firmly convinced that "Fawlty Towers" is in fact a documentary for the British hospitality industry.

For those out there who haven't seen this classic piece of television comedy, "Fawlty Towers is a British sitcom set in a Brighton hotel, where the manager, Basil Fawlty (played by John Cleese of "Monty Python" fame), is of the firm belief that the running of his hotel establishment would be improved greatly if it wasn't for all the guests in the place. While the British hospitality industry is admittedly not as bad as all that everywhere, I experienced sufficient strangeness to start considering the possibility that Basil Fawlty and Manuel the Spanish porter are running hotel management courses in some dark distant part of Hampshire.

For example:

• A hotel in Milton Keynes had - unusually for an English hotel - a mini-bar, however this was firmly and securely locked, with no indication as to what was contained inside or how to get into it. In fact, it was only an educated guess that is was a mini-bar, as there normally isn't the demand for a refrigerator in a hotel without one. I expect the hotel might have had a problem with pilferage, so the hotel management proudly took steps to stop it. And in the process somehow forgot about the point of having a room mini-bar for legitimate guests...
• Another hotel, this time in the small town of Garforth just outside Leeds in north England, had a singularly bizarre policy regarding their central heating. Doubtless for reasons of economy, the hotel decided to switch off their radiators between 11pm and 7am each night. At first, this sounds reasonable - except that they continued this into December, which in Yorkshire is the middle of winter. And a Yorkshire winter is the sort of Arctic cold that blasts in all the way from Siberia, a bone-chilling cold that freezes up condensation on parked cars in less than an hour... and still, the hotel turned the heaters off! And the hotel staff lived there! Surely they knew that guests might, like, you know, require to be kept warm at night in such conditions? Oh no! That's too expensive! They won't mind the cold! Yeah, right!
• Hampton Court, in London, had a hotel that excelled in the strange and eccentric. For starters, the rooms were across the street from reception, necessitating negotiating across a busy London street (which is redundant, all streets in London are busy) every morning for breakfast. And the rooms themselves - in a building which seemed to date back to the time of Charles Dickens at least - were marvels in classical geometry, for not one corner was a right-angle, which meant that the whole room had a floor plan resembling a pushed-over rectangle. This provided such fun-filled effects such as the bed, at right angles to one wall, was nevertheless at an angle of thirty degrees to the outside wall with the window. Being inside a room such as this - which even getting to it involved negotiating a virtual rabbit-warren of twisty passages, no small feat laden with large suitcases - was like sitting inside one of those Escher puzzle-pictures where everything is all inside-out and upside-down. For full effect, try this with a migraine headache coming on. Who needs drugs to take you out of this world?
• And finally, a hotel in Watford, just north-west of London, has the award for the most locked-into-the-script, I'm-just-doing-my-job-on-autopilot reception staff. This became apparent when I was checking out of this particular place, and was making a follow-on booking for in a couple of days. After checking me out of my room and taking the details of my next stay, the fellow at the desk asked "Can you make a fax confirmation of your booking please?"

  Hello? I'm standing right in front of you, in person, and you want me to go someplace else and fax you confirmation of my stay? Being here, in person, isn't good enough for you?

  I said as much to him (though more politely), and after a minute of furious thinking after having his script derailed, the guy did accept that there was no need for the confirmation fax. It was suggested to me later that what I should have done was asked to borrow their facilities, and try and send a fax from their own fax machine to itself...

  "Hmmm, your fax number's always busy. Could it be that I'm calling from the number I'm trying to dial? Naaaah..."

But don't let me put you off travelling to England. It really is a great - albeit expensive - place to visit. Just bear in mind that despite the latest attempts at hipness in "Cool Brittania", the great English tradition of eccentricity still survives!