From which hotels are worth the splurge to their most memorable experiences, two writers offer their top tips for a superior stay
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Between them, Fiona Duncan and Mark C. O’Flaherty have penned hundreds of The Telegraph’s 10,000 hotel reviews over the years, in Britain and beyond. We sat down with them at the Goring hotel in London’s Belgravia to put our burning questions to them.
Have one of your own? Ask in the comments below.
Get on the phone. I find it so depressing how few people these days book a hotel by phoning and talking to the people that run it. If you do that you can get into a conversation with them and say, “this is really cheeky of me, but if on check-in, you had one of your rooms with that amazing view, that would be so special to me and I would be so grateful if you could upgrade me to it”. Just use some common courtesy.
The only time I’ve ever been upgraded in a hotel by surprise was when I checked in very, very late to a chain hotel in Times Square. I was going for work and didn’t arrive until just after midnight; they had clearly oversold the hotel and so had to give me the penthouse suite, with which I was of course absolutely delighted.
But also in smaller hotels I’ve noticed that if they’re not full they will often automatically give you a better room because they want you to experience the best of the hotel. They’re not going to shove you in the attic if all the other rooms are free.
The place that comes to mind immediately is the Beaumont in London, specifically a stay in the Antony Gormley room because I think that to splurge on something it needs to be a one-off experience that you can’t get anywhere else.
You go into quite a traditional Beaumont room, conservative and luxurious, then in the white marble bathroom you go through these black velvet curtains into this incredible oak-lined room, which soars above you, and it’s the interior of the cuboid sculpture of the man crouching that you can see from the street outside. There’s this glowing white bed in the middle of the room; it’s so cinematic, sexy, dramatic and just unlike anything else you’ll find in the country or even in Europe.
The Mandarin Oriental, Bangkok. I just find it so scintillating and thrilling to be in. And of course you get a lot more for your money there than you would in Europe. More specifically and closer to home, there’s nothing more thrilling in London than a river-view room at the Savoy.
Flexible check-in and check-out times. We have a lot of different product offerings in this country, but generally check-in and check-out times are fairly standard and this doesn’t have to be the case. We know hotels in other countries can do it and the Hoxton group does it. It’s different if it’s a small hotel in the countryside because they’re too strapped for staff, but with AI, big city hotels that have housekeeping staff there all the time should be able to do it.
I wish I saw more hotels that were family-owned and passed from generation to generation. We are sitting in one now, which is incredibly rare in this country and I think it’s a crying shame. When I first started writing about hotels there were so many of these and they’ve just disappeared and been bought up by big groups with wealthy investors behind them. You can still get them in Italy, Austria and a bit in France, but they’re disappearing even in those countries and to me, they offer depth and integrity, which is what I love to find in a hotel.
I love a mega spa; I want to spend two hours doing the circuits and lounging in the pool, which is why I like the Gainsborough Bath Spa. I also still like the ESPA at the Corinthia London because it’s giant and a whole afternoon’s worth of entertainment.
I like spas that feel part of the hotel rather than bolted on, as well as enveloping and comfortable. I loved the spa at Louma in Dorset, which feels very natural and is surrounded by vineyards.
Service. I just want a hotel to be a place where I feel really comfortable and at home. I’ll always remember asking Tim Hart of Hambleton Hall, which has practically no facilities whatsoever, whether he wishes they had a spa. And he said: “No, my dear. A cup of tea in the garden, that’s our spa.” And that really sums up what I feel about a hotel as well.
Facilities! If the service is actively bad then that’s what I’m going to remember, but if it’s a destination hotel and I want to spend a lot of time there then I want things like an amazing spa.
Any book from the library of Hotel Endsleigh, which was curated by owner Alex and contains every book that I’ve ever loved and every book that I mean to read. It’s a perfect hotel library, chosen with such care.
This would never fit in even the biggest of suitcases, but also the sundial statue of James Joyce in the garden of the Merrion Hotel in Dublin. Joyce is pointing and when he points at where the sun is at that particular moment, an according passage from Ulysses is illuminated (the novel is set on a single day). It’s the most remarkable, beautiful thing and nobody knows it’s there because it’s in a garden.
More realistically, Bramley toiletries. I love the packaging and I love the way they smell. You can’t usually take toiletries from hotels any more because they come in big pump dispensers, which are much more eco-friendly of course.
I still take Acqua di Parma miniatures if I come across them because I still find them quite glamorous. And also in the bathroom – the Rainfinity showerhead at the Secrets Bahía Real Resort & Spa in Fuerteventura. I actually went online to look at how much they cost and I can’t imagine how they managed to fit all the rooms with these £1,000+ showerheads. I would very much like one.
A beach hotel in Mallorca when I was about 10 or 11. It was owned and run by this eccentric English couple and they were always having terrible fights then making up in front of the guests. Somehow it worked and people loved it; they came back every year. It made me realise that hotels are expressions of people and from then on, I loved a hotel with character. I don’t want to go somewhere that’s anodyne. It’s why I love the Goring, because I know that the people behind it are characterful.
As a child, my family always stayed in B&Bs and guesthouses on the south coast as my parents had a borderline phobia of travelling abroad, but eventually we started going to the Channel Islands, which was as far as they would go. I remember for several summers we stayed at the St Brelade’s Bay Hotel in Jersey and it was my first glimpse of glamour. I remember being really impressed by the cakes. I grew up in suburban south London where there was Battenberg cake at best, but this was real patisserie. There was also a pool and landscaped gardens. We even saw a sitcom celebrity in the bar. It blew my mind.
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