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Have you ever considered how much you pay to cover other people’s dishonesty? Luxury hotels worldwide are now finding it is financially worthwhile to add miniature high-tech tags to their fluffy towels, plush bathrobes and high-thread-count sheets.

Apparently up to 20 per cent of hotel stock goes home with guests, who clearly feel that the room price includes a couple of souvenirs. Somewhere down the line the cost of that missing stock has to be paid for – by all travelers.

More and more hotels are now using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to implant a tiny chip inside duvet covers, bed sheets, bathmats and pool towels. The cost of tagging is around a dollar per tag and the items can then be monitored using inventory tracking technology. The tags are well able to stand the rigors of the washing machine, being both flexible and washable. The ultimate systems can track each item from its removal from a housekeeping closet, making both staff and guests accountable.

What was most surprising to me was that following the press release, the idea of tagging hotel items was roundly condemned by the general public, who cited that “the price [luxury hotels] charge, we deserve the towels” or one wag who joked “I never stay in a newly opened hotel. The towels are too fluffy and I can never close my suitcase!”

Hopefully the threat of micro-tags may be a sufficient deterrent to light-fingered guests so that towels and sheets stay behind when guests check out and losses are minimized.

by Gillian

There might be severe belt-tightening and worried workers protesting on the streets, but Paris will still see four new five-star luxury hotels in the next fifteen months.

The first opened this week. The Royal Monceau, near the Arc de Triomphe, was previously a standard class hotel, but it’s been transformed by the celebrated French designer, Philippe Starck, into a luxury hotel in Paris, art gallery and club for what he calls ‘the smart tribe’.

Starck said that the hotel – now owned by the sovereign fund of Qatar and managed by the Singapore-based Raffles hotel group – was an attempt to recreate French modernity.

The three other luxury hotels are also being built (or rebuilt) with Asian or Middle Eastern capital. The Shangri-La, due to open in December, has been created by a Hong Kong-based group from a private mansion on the Avenue d’Iéna, with stunning views over the Seine to the Eiffel Tower.

The Mandarin Oriental (another Hong Kong funded project) will open next summer on the Rue Saint-Honoré, close to the Tuileries gardens and the Louvre, while the old Majestic Hotel on the Avenue Kléber is being converted (Qatari money again) into a 200-room ‘palace’, to be called the Peninsula-Majestic.

Paris is littered with beautiful sites, shops and expensive restaurants but is, surprisingly, under-supplied with top-of-the-range hotels. It has only seven establishments in the ‘super-luxury’ class, compared with 14 in London.

by Andy Moreton

Luxique’s travel experts have hand picked 63 luxury hotels in Paris and they’re available to book at the best possible rates.

A campaign is going on to try to preserve one of the last pristine Mediterranean beaches in Spain.

The area of Cabo de Gata in the south-east of the country includes 40 miles of protected coastline and a dramatic volcanic landscape. But campaigners say the authorities are down-grading the degree of protection afforded the beach area and other parts of the natural park, and this could lead to large-scale hotel development.

A 20-storey hotel was built on supposedly protected parkland next to El Algarrobico beach, despite local orders for construction to stop. Politicians have long promised to bulldoze it, but the 411-room glass and concrete structure still towers over the beach.

The Guardian’s correspondent in the area, Giles Tremlett, says that with swathes of Spain’s Mediterranean shoreline buried under concrete, the fate of this beach and park is seen as a test of how much politicians care about the damage done to the coasts of one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations.

Pilar Marcos of Greenpeace said: “Saving these last virgin spaces has to be a top priority. If they fail here then there will be nothing left. We will be leaving a legacy of brick and cement.”

But municipal architect, Manuel Rodríguez, countered: “We have growing unemployment here. Just building the hotel provided 200 jobs. What we need now is tourism and everybody knows that tourism starts with one hotel. This was our flagship.”

by Andy Moreton

Luxique offers a selection of luxury hotels in Spain – beach and city.