Reception? Help, I need a manual on turning the light off

On average I spend two or three nights a week in hotels, and until last weekend I hadn’t found one that wasn’t annoying in some way, or terrible.

The worst, in the tea region of north-western Uganda, was very terrible. The bedlinen had plainly not been washed since Idi Amin went west, so I decided to discard it and sleep on the mattress. Which, when I removed the sheet, turned out to be the most revolting thing in the world. I shan’t spoil your breakfast by describing the nature or hue of the unpleasant stains. I’ll just say that I haven’t retched quite so violently apart from the time when I was in China and I saw half a dog.

Then there was a hotel in Bolivia. I was woken up at 6 a.m. by one of the cleaners, who had come into my room without knocking. ‘Buenos dias,’ he said as he shuffled past my bed on his way to the bathroom. Where he enjoyed a noisy poo before shuffling back out of my room with nothing more than a mumbled ‘gracias’.

The Thief hotel in Oslo was very different from this. It had a manager of unrivalled professionalism and was equipped with all the things you’d expect in a country where every child’s state-sponsored micro-scooter has Swarovski crystals in its wheel hubs. My room was fabulous. It even had a fire.

And if I’d been moving in for a couple of years, I’d have been able to work out how all the features could be operated. But I was there for only a short time, and by the time I got to my room at night I was usually a bit too drunk to fathom out all the buttons, which meant I had to try to sleep with some of the lights on and the fire still blazing and the television still playing its ‘Mr Cluckson, welcome’ muzak.

This is my main beef with hotels. In countries with a smooth flow of electricity and no beheadings, they are all far too complicated. The check-in procedure is too lengthy and, after you’ve walked six miles to your room, you find the electronic key you’ve been given doesn’t work, so you have to trudge back to reception, with your bags, to check in again. And then when you finally get to your room, it’s like finding yourself at the controls of a Boeing jet liner and it’s your job to land it. You just sit there thinking, ‘But I don’t know how any of this stuff works.’

Take the shower as a prime example. You can see what goes through the mind of the management when it is choosing an attachment and the controls. ‘We are a good hotel and we must reflect that with a system that offers many jets and a sophisticated temperature-setting device.’

What this invariably means is that you turn it on and immediately get a jet of ice-cold water in your face. You know that you must turn the temperature up a bit, but the controls are located behind the jet of cold water, which, by the time you’ve found your spectacles to see which knob does what, has become hotter than molten lava. And your specs have steamed up and you’re blind.

Until last weekend the only hotel I had ever encountered with a decent shower was in Red Deer, in Alberta. That’s because there were so many holes in the ceiling I could just stand underneath one of them and wash my hair there. Although I almost certainly washed it in mouthwash because I was unable to read the microdot labelling used on miniature hotel bathroom products.

However, operating a hotel bathroom is nothing compared with the problems you encounter when you try to turn out the lights. There will come a point when you think you’ve cracked it. You’ve unplugged the lamp by the chair, drunkenly tripped over your suitcase, resorted to smashing the table lamp because it appeared to have no switch at all and then crawled back between the sheets thinking that you had only the bedside lamp to go.

But no. You’ve forgotten the wardrobe light, haven’t you? And by the time you’ve figured that one out, dawn is breaking and you discover to your horror that the electric curtains that took four hours to close have been made from tracing paper.

Some hotels helpfully provide one big switch by the bed that turns everything off. Including power to all the electricity sockets. Which means that when you wake up in the morning your phone hasn’t charged.

It has always made me wonder: what do people actually learn on hotel-management courses? Wear a tie. Stand up straight. And make sure the porn isn’t identified on the bill. I’m sure all this is very important. But do they learn that there’s no point providing guests with a television remote control if there are no instructions on how to use it?

All of which brings me to last weekend. Everyone in the country, it seemed, was going to a wedding in Winchester, which meant that every room in the city was booked. Apart from one at a hotel called The Winchester.

I arrived and my shoulders sagged. There was a wedding here too. The sort where all the men turn up in patterned satin waistcoats. Or a kilt, for no reason. The carpets were hideous, and the wallpaper looked as though it had been chosen from Osborne & Little’s Liverpool Lottery Winner collection.

But the check-in procedure took four seconds, the electronic key worked – that’s a first – and the mattress in the room was comfortable. What’s more, there were instructions in the bathroom for the extremely simple shower controls, there were light switches by the bed that turned the lights off, the curtains were thick enough to stop shrapnel and, joy of joys, there was no temperature in the room. It wasn’t warm and it wasn’t chilly. That’s another first.

I do not know who manages this hotel, but if you are running the Carlton in Cannes or London’s Dorchester you should call them immediately and offer them a job.

15 May 2016