November 2nd, 2005, by Mary Winston Nicklin
New Over-the-Top Perks at Luxury Hotels
Jumping on the blog bandwagon, I’d like to highlight the interesting NYT piece about the ultra-lux perks recently employed by luxury hotels, in order to distinguish themselves and entice repeat customers. Notable extravagant examples include the Four Seasons Manhattan (where a $400,000 Maybach 62 and a $325,000 Rolls-Royce Phantom are parked out front for clients’ use), the Conrad Istanbul (which provides CD players and discs for guests to learn useful Turkish phrases) and the Loews Annapolis Hotel (where guest can “borrow” the hotel’s Labrador retriever, Luke.) Experienced any hotel perk that can top this list?!
Over the top is how I like it. In fact, a few weeks ago I was at the Ritz in Boston and the concierge demonstrated over the top service by booking what he called “Luggage Forwarding Service” for me. When the concierge showed up in my room to take my luggage he said, “would you like this forwarded home today or shall I just bring it to the curb?”…. so I took him up on the offer. He collected my address information and as promised the luggage was delivered to my home the following day! Very cool. I’ll never travel with luggage again if I can help it.
The Washingtonian Magazine last month did a list of perks you get while staying at luxury hotels in Washington, DC. One hotel had an employee who loaned her dog to a guest who was missing their own. Another one bought a car in one day for a guest’s daughter for her birthday, and another hotel had an employee fly to new york for a guest’s pair of shoes.
You can see the Washingtonian article here:
http://www.washingtonian.com/capital_comment/2005/1105capcom.html
It is the last article at the bottom, and came out before the Four Seasons received the Mobil 5 star award.
Luggage Forwarding is brilliant! Know of any other hotels that offer this service?
Apparently, you can forward luggage between any two points. I think they might be working with Ski.com too because I noticed their logo on the ski.com site when I was booking my trip to telluride. My family is staying at the Inn at Lost Creek, I can’t wait! And, yes I am forwarding all of our skis… their site is luggageforward.com.
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