An Inside Look At London’s Most Expensive Luxury Hotels with One of the most notorious hotels for this is The Dorchester, where £770 for a 50g portion and £570 bottle of NV Krug Rosé are popular menu items. In The Dorchester’s infamous Promenade, Middle Eastern millionaires meet to talk freely in privacy. The height of the sofas and faux-marble pillars make it difficult for outsiders to gage who is talking to who. And that is precisely what they are used for nowadays, a place to do business in private.
Only a few decades London’s grandiose hotels saw a crash. Without the masses noticing, these hotels have found success in an entirely new way. As an example a London Real Estate Agent I know told me, “I do business with a Saudi client, and he comes over with an entourage of 70 people. He has homes in London, but he does business in the hotels.” And this is not a rare happening. Middle Eastern’s wealthiest few have come to love spending time in London’s hotels so much that they have bought most of them too. The Sultan of Brunei owns the Dorchester; Saudi prince al-Waleed bin Talal has renovated his Savoy; and the Barclay brothers sold their stake in Claridge’s, the Berkeley and the Connaught to a company controlled by Qatari sovereign funds.
This closeness brings up a much bigger theme in London’s luxury hotel industry.
The Dorchester has its internal boulevard – you are not looking out at Hyde Park. At Claridge’s, you are looking at the staircase, not London. The whole idea is to separate you from people outside, so you can enjoy yourself in this sort of citadel, unencumbered by the view of people who can’t afford to get in.
In order to ensure that the 1% stay in and the 99% keep out, these hotels have commissioned Michelin-starred restaurants and upscale spas, which only the affluent can afford. This includes hotel managers who focus on providing the ultimate privacy for these customers. Nowadays there is no amenity a hotel won’t include to steer you from going elsewhere; and it seems to be working. The wealthiest guests can be found doing business in the lobbies, going for dinner nightly at the hotels eateries and booking whole floors of hotel rooms for their posse.
A Dorchester staffer say “a Qatari guest took over the three big suites at the top of the hotel this year, hired a personal chef for his long stay, and apparently spent more than £40,000 a night. ‘Everything happens upstairs,’ he says – meaning that the guest never had to leave his floor.”
There is nothing that these hotels won’t do for these clients that keep them alive. The future may bring changes in the accessibility of these stunning places, but for now it’s for you the 1%.
An Inside Look At London’s Most Expensive Luxury Hotels – October 21, 2015 | OnceOff Group
