Here at the Hotel Pas bon marché we like to think of our guests as king. However, that rules out the fairer sex, so we really like to think of guests as royalty. Of course, most of us associate royalty with wealth, exorbitance, and so on and so forth. You get what you pay for, royalty know this almost as well as Michael Jackson does when he is looking to purchase a new vase.

So that’s why, here at the Hotel Pas bon marché, we have to afford our customers the luxuries that they expect from a £200 per night mid-week stay in our fine establishment. We don’t skimp, we don’t save and we pass our costs along the line, all the way to the final arbiter in the equation: the customer. If they end up paying through the nose for our services, who cares? They’re royalty and they can afford it, right? Well, that sounds fine and dandy, however we’re a business, so of course we skimp and save. But we still pass our costs on to our loyal guests.

That’s why we like to charge £20.78 for a gin & tonic and a glass of red wine. Royalty pay that kind of price. And in that price, you’ll find our service charge of £2.03 added automatically for your convenience. I mean, you wouldn’t want to have to go through the process of working out the tip we required: our service is such that it deserves a sizable tip. Of course, the service charge is optional, but we’re not going to tell you that up front because that might mean less money passes from you to us, and that’s the name of the game: we want your money.

But this isn’t just any old gin, we don’t appreciate references to current prime ministers and nor do the real royals when they find themselves in need of a place to rest their weary heads after a hard day watching or playing polo. No sir, royalty needs to remember the Empire: we serve only the finest Bombay Sapphire Gin.

Our red wine isn’t any old red wine and it’s not from M&S either. We choose to serve the smoothest Côtes du Rhône in 250ml glasses. At least that’s what we on print the receipt you receive as a souvenir of your stay with us. Who knows if we are serving cheap table wine or the fine vintage that you believe you’re sipping? Let’s face it, we’re in the money making market, so we’ll probably have sourced the cheapest Côtes du Rhône that we can find. It’s psychological, probably.

We do all this with a smile. We take your money, your £10 note, we go to our point of sale and return with the receipt, politely tell you “this is not a £100 note sir, it’s a £10 note, your drinks cost £20.78”. We’ve done this many times, we know the reaction we’re going to get, we know you’re a comedian; even Scottish comedians are amongst our most humorous guests. We should start a comedy club; it could a money spinner. But we’re not into spinning money, we’re interested in taking money from our guests, so that’s why we can get away with charging what amounts to £10 per drink. Every round is a winner, our bar manager loves it. Ka-ching squared.

It’s humour all the way, because we know from experience that you were simply winding us up when you gave us a £10 and expected change. You’re royalty after all, you’re loaded – it’s our job to exploit that fact and make you part with your cash because you yourself, you don’t care. It’s only money, you have plenty of it, you must do, you’re staying in our establishment and we charge £200 per night mid-week.

Craig stayed at a major hotel in Jermyn Street. It was nice. He’s not royalty, but was surprised about many aspects of the service. Breakfast was a fine motion of dining excellence: cooked fresh, the presentation was impeccable and tidy. The plate was heated to a decent temperature to ensure that the waitress burnt her fingers and the bacon was kept hot for as long as possible.

However the dirty napkin let the Executive Chef’s branded service down somewhat. The warmed bread that was offered as toast was not becoming. I’m sure the Executive Chef would cringe had he seen the serving mechanism for the butter and Flora – they were supplied in delightful little white tubs, carefully shaped with a fine lining of foil on top: these are little containers that are so popular outside of royal circles. Those containers aren’t the finest bone china, no, they’re made of plastic. And let’s not get started about the ironing board in the room – the one that would not stay up. With no hand-pumps in the bar, this hotel will not make it into any CAMRA guides.

Technorati Tags: expensive round of drinks

My trip to London on Wednesday and Thursday was meant to be simple and run-of-the-mill. I had even planned to meet up with @irascian and @olivers thanks to the power of Twitter. Indeed I did meet up with Ian and Oliver, however my meeting with Oliver was rudely cut short because some clown, idiot, tube decided that his rucksack had to be deposited at the end of one of Heathrow’s two runways. He managed to carefully place this rucksack within the airport grounds during a state of BAA’s heightened security.

Whatever his intentions, he managed to force the cancellation of a lot of domestic flights. I’m not hugely interested in the international flights that were cancelled – I was on a domestic to Edinburgh. It didn’t take me long to realise that the end-game for me involved staying over in London for another night. I re-arranged my flight to depart the next morning at 0755 – resigning myself to the fact that I had to find accommodation (huge thanks to @zimakki and his other half for that).

However what really infuriated me about this incident was that I was no longer able to record a short video teaser with @olivers for DDD Ireland. Yes, it was great catching up with Oliver for a beer, however we were unable to grab some recording time to make a 5 minute teaser video. It will happen, I hope to pop down to Oliver’s place of residence, taking my Sony HDD camcorder such that I can record his teaser video!

BAA, please pass your compensation requests on – make this idiot pay for it. Give him a job in your customer service department. But don’t pay him; make him take the worst customers, the ones that shouted at British Airways who bore the brunt of the cancellation woes. Make him deal with those folks, he’ll soon realise the power of democracy and the state of our nation. It wasn’t British Airway’s fault, yet still a handful of customers “kicked off” at their customer service team. Wrong on so many levels – the minute you annoy a customer service representative, you’re lost. Resign yourself to the fact that “shit happens”. You’re staying in London for another night or you’re getting a 8-10 hour coach ride home to Edinburgh. Live with it.

However, whilst he might have been an idiot, we have to consider the fact that overall airport security was stated as being “heightened”. Whatever that means… It surely means that muppets like this can’t just traverse the perimeter fence, saunter up to the end of the runway and then drop his rucksack. Surely not. Heightened security. You gotta be kiddin’ me?

He might be an idiot, a muppet or whatever. But please, surely airport perimeter security are sailing in the same boat? They must be feeling a bit red-faced right now.

This incident saw one of the runways closed for a while. It might have been useful to have that third runway that everybody’s ranting about…but that’s another blog post and should be considered rhetoric.

The icing on the cake: I returned to Edinburgh on the 0755 flight some 14 hours after my first flight was cancelled. Imagine my surprise when I found out that my baggage had been left behind at Heathrow…It turns out that flights from Gatwick, Manchester and Heathrow had baggage issues – the queue at British Airway’s baggage services was very long indeed. Out of the hours from Thursday 1700 to Friday 1100, I must have spent 4 of them standing in queues. But anyway, baggage is being located and couriered to me in due course.

Technorati Tags: BAA, BA, airport security, LHR, Heathrow