In October 1979 Geoff Simpson and Len Gisby were driving through France on the way to Spain with their wives Pauline and Cynthia. They spend a night near Montelimar. Down the road from the Motel Ibis they found a guest house which seemed to belong to a by-gone age. At breakfast Cynthia noticed the other guests wearing clothes fashionable at the start of the century. The Gisbys and the Simpsons drove on into Spain. They’d never had a better holiday. Everywhere their cameras clicked. They brought back albums full of snaps but not a single shot of the French hotel. Both Len and Geoff took pictures there. When the films were processed, the hotel snaps had vanished without trace. And on the way back they could not even find the building. Had they stayed at a phantom hotel? ... Were they caught up in a time-slip? Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World of Powers
They [Gisbys & Simpson) were so impressed by the hotel they decided to stay there again on the way back to England. The next surprise came back in England when the two couples had their photos developed. The shock of the missing photographs spurred the Gisbys to carry out their own research. They discovered the Gendarme’s uniform and the dress worn by the woman dated from the 1900s. It’s almost as if the two couples had travelled back in time. But why did no-one comment on their car? And how did they pay the bill with modern money? Strange But True?
With the modern currency he accepted it. And that was it. I mean it had always puzzled me. The only thing I can think of with all the dates corresponding is that we went into a time-lapse; we went back in Time. Len Gisby
It was a very narrow street – a ravine of tall, leprous houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse. All the houses were hotels and packed to the tiles with lodgers, mostly Poles, Arabs and Italians. At the foot of the hotels were tiny bistros, where you could be drunk for the equivalent of a shilling. On Saturday nights about a third of the male population of the quarter were drunk. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
My hotel was called the Hotel de Trois Moineaux. It was a dark rickety warren of five storeys, cut up by wooden partitions into four rooms. The rooms were small and inveterately dirty … The walls were as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they had been covered with layer after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and housed innumerable bugs. ibid.
There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris slums were a gathering-place for eccentric people – people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words. ibid.
What keeps a hotel going is the fact that the employees take a genuine pride in their work, beastly and silly though it is. ibid.
The dirt in the Hotel X, as soon as one penetrated the service quarters, was revolting. Our cafeteria had year-old filth in all the dark corners, and the bread-bin was infested with cockroaches. ibid.
I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was – I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. Jack Kerouac, On the Road
I said, ‘I will build you this incredible, gorgeous, gleaming hotel; I will put to work in the construction trades and save hotel jobs and the Grand Central area will come around.’ So the city made the deal. Donald Trump, cited Marilyn Bender, The Empire and Ego of Donald Trump & New York Times
This is the room of the Algonquin Hotel in New York City. It looks today much as it did in the 1920s. It is a room for talk and laughter but it is missing its star players, ten or so men and women made their mark as humorous journalists and playwrights in a single decade after World War I … They came to be known as the Algonquin Round Table. The Ten Year Lunch: The Wit and Legend of the Algonquin Round Table, 1987
It was that unique moment of confidence. ibid.
It was the last time in America when the written word was paramount. ibid.
85 theatres thrived in Times Square alone. ibid.
Dorothy Parker became the most quoted woman in New York. ibid.
People came to stare at them at lunch. ibid.
Groucho Marx never sat at the Round Table. ibid.
Claridge’s in the heart of London’s Mayfair is a 5-star luxury hotel favoured by royalty and celebrities. Here things are done a little differently. The £3 million chandelier has 800 unique pieces that have to be individually hand-cleaned every night. Inside Claridge’s, BBC 2017
Famed for its Art Deco interior the hotel has 2 miles of corridors, 400 staff and serves over a 1,000 lobsters and 60,000 bottles of champagne a year. ibid.
Sammy the spaniel has stayed over 20 times at the hotel. ibid.
Claridge’s has 83,000 guests a year. ibid.
More than a third of Claridge’s guests are from the United States. ibid.
Known by some as the annexe of Buckingham Palace, it opened its doors in 1854 under the watchful eye of Mrs Claridge. Inside Claridge’s II
The staff race against the clock in their quest for perfection. ibid.
It’s currently undergoing the biggest restoration in 40 years. ibid.
114,190. £50 a head for afternoon tea with champagne. ibid.
Dignitaries and heads of state are checking in for the Olympics. Inside Claridge’s III
Some stay so often they have their clothes and furniture stored between visits. ibid.
Matt Orlando, head chef at Noma, has just arrived. He’s here to find out whether the Claridge’s kitchen can cope with the new menu. ibid.
They couldn’t hear me. They couldn’t see me. But I could hear them and see them. It’s been a secret all these years. It’s been a secret for 47 years … A lot of people are going to call me a pervert. A peeping Tom. Voyeur, Foos, 2017
I’m pursuing a story about a man named Gerard Foos who decided he wanted to buy a motel for the express purpose of using it to watch everything that was being done in private. ibid. Gay Talese, journalist
He writes it down … hundreds and hundreds of stories. ibid.
I’m wondering how firmly I can rely on him. The hotel is real. ibid.
He wanted to be discovered. ibid.
Gay Talese Disavows His Own Book Before It’s Published Saying ‘Its Credibility is Down the Toilet.’ ibid. newspaper article
I got in his life and I ruined it. ibid. Foos
That book is really dead. ibid. Talese
This is the Corinthia Hotel: a stone’s throw away from London’s Trafalgar Square overlooking the River Thames. Prime Real Estate and five-star luxury for the super-rich. The German general manager is Thomas Kochs previously of Claridge’s Hotel. With clients paying up to tens of thousands of pounds a night, it’s Thomas’s job to make their stay perfect. Hotel for the Super Rich & Famous I, BBC 2018
A staff of 500 from 54 nationalities … The busiest department is housekeeping. ibid.
Thomas wants a big name for his hotel … Tom Kerridge, a two-Michelin-star chef, has two gastro-pubs and a butcher’s shop in Marlow. Hotel for the Super Rich & Famous II
The restaurant will close for three months and undergo a £1.5 million refurbishment to the specification of the newly appointed successor, Tom Kerridge. ibid.
Shadow, a male Harris hawk, arrives every week to keep the pigeons and gulls off the penthouses. ibid.
Several new hotels are being constructed nearby. ibid.
The hotel’s £1 million Baccarat chandelier is its pride and joy. ibid.
Dexter can deliver up to 40 meals during his night shift; some bills come to thousands of pounds. ibid.
Every year hundreds of thousands of young Brits flock here for beautiful sun-drenched beaches, amazing hotels and perhaps the biggest parties in the world. The good news is that it’s never been cheaper or easier to holiday here. But why is it costing so little? … A darker side to tourism. Stacey Dooley Investigates: Thailand – Tourism & Truth, W 2019
Ten tourists to every local: Stacey will be staying in the Patong beach area of Phuket … Stacey wants to find out more about staff conditions. ibid.
Las Vegas boulevard: the glitziest four and half mile highway in all of America. Known to everyone as the strip. It’s home to six of the world’s ten largest hotels. Secret World of Las Vegas I, Channel 5 2019