Hosting big business or goverment gatherings generates huge publicity for hotels, but with the privilege comes considerable potential for calamity, says Derek Picot.

This year’s G7 summit, which took place in late August at the Hôtel du Palais Biarritz, brought with it not only the heads of state of the world’s largest economies but also havoc for the rich in what is regarded by the French as the mecca of bling on the Atlantic coast. The French newspaper Liberation described the hotel as a “gold bunker” for world leaders to hide away, confer and indulge. The inconvenience to the wealthy tourists who normally enjoy this haven of style and surf was considerable. Even the beach was closed.

Government summits have always created mayhem wherever they go, from the Dorado Beach Resort in Puerto Rico in 1976 to Gleneagles in 2005. Ever since the birth of Christ at an overbooked inn, momentous occasions seem pre-directed to happen within the world of hospitality. Conferences at the Beau-Rivage Palace in Lausanne have, over the years, provided several important treaties, while Paris’s finest hotels hosted most of the politicians who signed the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Even Lucky Luciano, the Chicago hoodlum, held the first Crime Convention at the city’s Blackstone hotel in 1931.

ROOMS AT THE TOP

Government summits and large business conferences have much in common. For a start, there are always a number of presidents, senior vice-presidents, vice-presidents and regional presidents, and unfortunately they all want to be treated equally.

Accommodation is the first challenge. For the US president travelling with the ridiculously named “Secret Service”, who are as visible as yellow-vested traffic policemen, a hotel is required to have a long, straight corridor that leads to the Presidential suite. Security must have a clear line of sight. Next to the suite there has to be a communications room, and somewhere along the same stretch another suite for the president’s number two. It is not appropriate to mix presidents on the same floor and, dependent on the size of the country, the higher up the building they go. Low-level suites are out of the question for any president of worth. It’s too easy to aim a rifle from a window across the street.

The selection of a host hotel is usually carried out by company security if it’s a corporate event, or the military for a governmental one. On one occasion, I learnt that gravity rather than frivolity should greet those who come on this preliminary inspection. Spotting the head of security of a computer firm arriving into our lobby, I rushed over enthusiastically, grabbed his hand and shook it vigorously. Like a lightbulb with a bayonet fitting, it sprung, disconnected, from his arm. Frantically, I tried to push it back into its socket, but to no avail. His coterie of assistants eventually restored calm.

After I had apologised, he told me that he had lost his hand in Vietnam. He explained he had a variety of attachments that he could use with this prosthetic arrangement. Somewhat like a Swiss army knife, I assume – a corkscrew, a pair of pliers perhaps? It must have its advantages, although obviously I had identified a disadvantage.

Another time, the hotel hosted an important car launch. The vehicle had to be spirited into the ballroom at midnight and kept under wraps until the event the next day. I had warned our concierge that under no circumstances was anybody allowed through the main entrance until it was time for the guests to arrive.

While running through the dress rehearsal that morning, and at the moment this magnificent piece of automobile engineering was unveiled, the doors of the room were flung open and a host of flashbulbs went off. Standing there was the doorman with a hoard of motor journalists. “Sir,” he announced, “the gentlemen of the press are here; they got through by putting money in my hand.”

So, large summits and conferences are hazardous to arrange and unpredictable in nature. In Biarritz, presumably a figure such as President Donald Trump was accustomed to expect the unexpected. After all, he is a hotel tycoon and must recognise that conferences are difficult enough without the impediment of controversy. I noted with interest a piece in Fortune (May 2019) that claimed demand at Trump hotels was falling and that new brands announced the previous year would now no longer be developed. Promoting a surname may work for the likes of Conrad Hilton and Bill Marriott, but when presidents and politics are mixed with hotel business, the outcomes are not always desirable.

Derek Picot has been a hotelier for more than 30 years, and is author of Hotel Reservations.