Hiding engagement rings in sandcastles – and other requests made by super-rich hotel guests

A few years ago I stayed at a luxury five star hotel in Miami, where a deliciously indiscreet concierge spilled the beans about the lengths his team had to go to when a British band of rock-royalty status came to stay. The guitarist had specifically requested a shepherd’s pie via room service (cue one Floridian chef’s bamboozled googling), while the lead singer demanded, the concierge bemoaned: “Full blackout of the suite to help him sleep. He did not want to see ONE RAY OF LIGHT peeking through the curtains”.

But in a competitive market for luxury hospitality, today it’s not just celebrities that demand their every whim fulfilled. In 2024, major hotel brands are indulging in a death match of concierge one-upmanship, touting personalisation of everything from a hotel room’s temperature on arrival and room scent to pillows and installed artwork, including pictures of guests’ families and pets, with smaller hoteliers saying that hotel brands are risking a looming crisis in concierges’ and housekeepers’ workload.

It’s the most well-to-do guests who give even the starriest celebs a run for their money, says Katherine Scott, a private travel consultant based in Harrogate. In recent years, Scott has arranged a private tour of the Vatican to fit a demanding guest’s “preferred breakfast time”; a private “rendezvous with monkeys” in Japan, followed by “a private origami session”; and for one demanding male guest, a string of hotel stays featuring on-site wood-fired pizza ovens – “wood-fired was non-negotiable” – at which the guest’s hotel minibar had to be stripped of beer and gin miniatures and fully stacked with cans of “full fat” coca-cola.

“The demographic we are talking about here is high net worth but time poor,” Scott, who is regularly telephoned in the small hours by her international clients, explains. “Of course they also have very low levels of patience. They want what they want, and they want it now.”

Scott’s most memorable task was to arrange a trip for a group of well-to-do women on a girls’ minibreak, who wanted to be trailed by a fleet of Mercedes around Paris, so they didn’t have to walk for more than five minutes at a time in their towering heels. These Sex and the City wannabes presented a challenge, Scott admits, where prickly Parisian gendarmes were concerned. “The Mercs couldn’t park up constantly or drive alongside them: it was a bloody nightmare to organise,” she laughs.

Srikanth Devarapalli, the GM at five star The Emerald Maldives Resort and Spa, explained that one of the guests in their thatched luxury villas – which come with pools and jacuzzis and views across the fringing powder sands of the Raa Atoll – told his private butler that he “missed his Ferrari back home” and asked if he could drive a Ferrari around the island resort. “The villa host responded by mounting a Ferrari logo on the golf cart, which absolutely delighted him,” Devarapalli says.

Rémi Delpech, the MD of luxury riad hotel IZZA in Marrakech, once arranged to have a famous footballers’ initials embossed into a leather-covered coffee machine. “4,000 euros,” he laughs, “at least he took it home with him!”

The hip W hotel Ibiza, meanwhile, made one aspiring dad DJ’s dream come true by arranging for him to spin the decks poolside for an evening.

Unsurprisingly, it’s bespoke destination marriage proposals which tend to involve the most extreme requests. At Milaidhoo, a thatched boutique on the Baa Atoll, also in the Maldives, concierges arranged an “underwater proposal” for one guest, featuring full scuba gear, a professional underwater photographer and a proposal message “revealed on a coral reef”; and staff at luxury resort Baros have stashed rings in sandcastles for proposing guests, and in glass bottles on the end of fishing rods.

In the UK, hyper-personalisation often has a more whimsical bent. Zoë Cunliffe, the manager-owner of The Gilpin, a luxury lodge boutique in the Lake District, explained that hyper personalisation is “all about anticipating guests’ needs”.

“During a recent turn down, our team noticed some cold and flu medicine in one of our guest’s bedrooms,” she recalls, “so we swiftly sourced local honey, fresh ginger and some sliced lemon and left them on the bedside table alongside a little note with instructions on how they can make a soothing tea and wishing them a speedy recovery.”

Philip Steiner, General Manager of London’s Bankside Hotel says that having discovered one of his guest’s children loved Harry Potter, his team transformed the family’s room into a Potter paradise, “with a recreated Hogwarts door and personalised Hogwarts letters”. Touches like this, Steiner believes, “ensure that every guest feels genuinely recognised and valued”.

Sharon Brown, Hotel Manager at The Resident Liverpool, said that the boutique recently satisfied one guest’s bizarre request for a “picture of a toad, sitting under a mushroom in the rain, placed in a frame on the bedside table”.

A range of apps and platforms have now emerged to help hoteliers personalise guests’ experience, including “guest communication platform” Duve, and Canary Technologies’ “guest experience platform” which promises to “maximise guest satisfaction”. Marriott, Hilton and IHG all have apps that allow guests to personalise their stays and make “special requests” of the hotel before their arrival.

But not everyone is a fan of the hyper-personalisation trend. Holidaymaker Abby Knight, 59 and from Essex, says she finds pre-hotel stay questionnaires “stressful”. “It’s just more things to think about, isn’t it?”, she says. “Honestly, it feels like another job to do at the start of your holiday.” Knight says that she would rather leave matters such as pillow firmness and room scent to the hotel professionals.

Heightened expectations can also be hard for smaller hoteliers, says Vicky Saynor, proprietor of Hertfordshire self-catering boutique Bethnal & Bec. “What we find very tricky being a small business is the many requests we get – ‘can you do something special as it’s my partner’s birthday’, for example – with these extras being expected for free.” When Saynor suggests that guests source these extras themselves from external providers, such as florists and caterers, she is routinely “met with dissatisfaction and contempt”.

Nevertheless, with the five-star bar – and the price of a suite – climbing ever higher, the hyper-personalisation trend shows no signs of cooling. With brands occupying the upper echelons of luxury travel in a constant battle to outdo one another, and their guests expectations ever loftier, the likes of golf-cart Ferraris and shepherd’s pie could soon seem tame.