Unique luxury hotels, fashionable travel and much more

Over the past couple of years, I’ve featured some weird and wonderful hotels – among them hay barns, former prisons, a converted nuclear bunker and an old jumbo jet.

Now, travel journalist and photographer Bettina Kowalewski has produced a book featuring 27 of her favourite wacky places to stay. It’s called Bed In A Tree (DK Eyewitness Travel). It has that title because that was one of the accommodation options she found in South Africa.

Bettina’s been all round the world in search of eccentric hotels and the stories behind them. One of the cutest has to be the Dog Bark Park Inn in Cottonwood, Idaho, which has been built in the shape of a giant beagle named Sweet Willy. ‘A paw-star hotel with plenty of barking!’ quipped the Sun newspaper here in the UK.

The collection also includes an ice hotel in Sweden, a stone pineapple in Scotland and a large suitcase in Germany.

This last one intrigued me, so I investigated further. The Zum Prellbock Kofftel bed and breakfast in Lunzenau is not so much a suitcase, more a large trunk. Situated next to an outdoor railway museum, the cosy case comes with two beds and a small bathroom.

by Andy Moreton

In his 1987 novel The New Confessions, my favourite author, William Boyd, describes how an amorous breakfasting couple leave a hotel bed ‘covered in honey trails, toast crumbs, coffee stains and a cigarette burn.’

The woman reassures her lover: “Chambermaids have seen it all,” she says; “they’re like nurses, nothing shocks them.”

That’s just as well, if the revelations of the executive housekeeper at a luxury London hotel are anything to go by. He told a Sunday colour magazine recently that one guest checked out and left a blow-up doll sitting in his empty bed. The same guest returned two weeks later and left another one!

The item most often stolen from a hotel room isn’t apparently the bathrobe or slippers – it’s the hairdryer. That’s why so many hotels now have permanent ones wired to the wall. The most left-behind item is a mobile phone charger.

Other interesting facts:
• Chambermaids are now known as room attendants
• It takes an average of 28 minutes to clean a room
• Men are tidier than women and the Japanese are the tidiest
• The room attendant knocks once, then once again and if there’s still no response, he/she enters … whatever you’re doing.

by Andy Moreton