A Mandarin Lemon

A Mandarin Lemon

I taught hospitality economics at the Cornell School of Hotel Management back when it was called that and I was in business school. I found it interesting to come up with hospitality examples of fundamental economic concepts and, of course, I have always enjoyed the teaching process. I have spent the last fifty years staying in every type and manner of hotel you can imagine. I have stayed in my early motorcycling days at some very basic Best Westerns in southern Utah where a plastic chair outside the room door qualified as a veranda. I stayed at places like the famed Hotel du Cap in Cap d’Antibes where F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote Tender is the Night and Aristotle Onassis wooed Jackie Kennedy. I have paid $20 for a night in a hostel and $2,000 per night for a luxurious suite (I recognize that such an amount is a mere bag of shells compared to what you can spend on a luxury suite these days). I enjoy staying in a really nice resort hotel or a very posh urban business hotel, but I also find the act of putting my head down for 6-7 hours, taking a shower and leaving in the morning to be such a relatively trivial part of the day that it almost seems wasteful to look beyond the basics in a hotel room. Of course, what gets defined as basic changes with time and now I really do need a good bed and a decent shower to be happy with my choice of hotels.

We have been riding the European motorcycle circuit with Skip and Kaz for over twenty years now. While many of their clients are rough and ready and prefer economy accommodations on their trips, they know that our gang enjoys a more upscale experience. Therefore, they always book us in nicer hotels wherever we go. This trip through Spain and Portugal over this few weeks has a wonderful array of hotels that read like a who’s who of the Iberian hospitality industry. The biggest urban center we are visiting is right here in Barcelona, the center of the Principality of Catalonia, a state that, viewed in the events of Spanish history, has always wanted to be its own independent province. What is arguably the best hotel in Barcelona is the Mandarin Oriental Barcelona, a hotel the Google gives €€€€ in reference to its pricing, which is the highest designation afforded (in more than one sense of the word). Fortunately, the exchange rate is currently at parity with 1.00 € = 1.00 $, at least on Google and in the news. At JFK it was 1.14 and I was much too shrewd to buy some Euros there, opting instead to buy them at the airport in Barcelona. There I got 1.18 with a 50% buy-back arrangement, which given that I tend to never sell back freely-traded currencies, opting instead to just keep it for my next trip, means I got a shitier deal at BCN than at JFK. Brilliant bit of international finance. Today, when I see an ATM I will test out the local exchange via that route as I will at the front desk of the hotel, just to see where my options are best. The way I tend to spend cash with great abandon, I’m not sure this subtle difference really matters too much, but its part of the FX dance one does while trying to pretend one is a savvy global warrior.

But, back to our hotel. To begin with, Barcelona seems to be as impacted by the post-COVID employment shortage as the U.S. is, at least in terms of the housekeeping staff at a hotel like this. We arrived at 1:30pm and were required to wait until 2:45pm to be given a cleaned room. In fairness to the hotel, they really are quite the perfectionists with their room cleanliness, so I’m sure they tend to rush nothing in room preparation. We chose NOT to take up the offer to go to the rooftop bar or even the dining room bar, which is where they wanted us to hang out, but rather, chose to flop our travel-weary bodies down in the lobby where all arriving guest could see that we were tired and unhappy hotel guests waiting for their room. I think this tactic might have bought us fifteen minutes since we got our room keys fifteen minutes before the advertised check-in time of 3pm.

The Mandarin Oriental Barcelona is predictably central in its location in this lovely city. That means that it is set in an old and ornate Catalonian building that has been thoroughly and stylishly modernized inside in the best of Alta-moda European fashion. Its all very sleek and stylish. That carries through to the guest rooms as well as the common spaces. The rooms are blonde hardwood floor (no LVT here!) with an area rug under the bed. The furniture and wardrobes are matching and the blend of smoked opaque and clear glass that separates the bathroom area (which runs the length of the room) all seem to be well-matched. Earth tones abound with not a pastel or vibrant flair of color to be seen. The electronic fittings are first class and plentiful, so, in essence, the room is very nicely appointed. That is where the pleasantries of the room ended.

I am sure there is a subcommittee of the International Society of Hotel Associations that focuses entirely on hotel guest room doors, so I do not presume to know the latest thinking on such things, but when we got to our guest room door (the desk clerk offered to show us to the room, but we declined as part of our peaceful protest program), the good news was that the digital card lock worked well and the green light signaled that the door was open. The bad news was that we pulled and tugged and it wouldn’t open. Then we inadvertently pushed in and voila! I was always taught that hotel guest room doors are required to open out so that in case of a fire, guests have a better chance of getting out. I suppose you can argue that if emergency workers have to get in to save someone, they should open in, but I still think I’m right that most hotel doors should open out.

We did not have to wait too long to get our extremely heavy bags, laden with motorcycle gear for the ride across the country, delivered to our door and hoisted into our room. The problem came less in the delivery timing and rather in the issue of where to put the damn things and still render the room functional. Now this room is not anywhere near as small as the JFK TWA Hotel rooms, which are the subject of much humor among those of us who have stayed there, but these are pretty efficiently small rooms for a double room in the most luxurious hotel in Barcelona. There is a lovely large round stone tub in the bathroom that we will never use and that’s nice. There is a decent-sized toiled cubicle, which is just fine. But everything else in the room is undersized by our big American people standards. I am not suggesting that this is like the rooms in Tokyo where you rent a hole in the wall to sleep in. Nor is it even like a single room in Zurich where the Swiss pride themselves in efficiently making the smallest beds known to mankind. But this is too damn small for two big motorcyclists and their gear.

The Mandarin Oriental Barcelona is certainly stylish. It is also very high-grade in terms of service (they clean the room twice per day, which is very unusual by today’s standards) and everyone from the restaurant to the lobby staff is very genteel and polite. But the room is simply too damn small for the price we are paying. We are staying here for three nights (one night down, two to go), so we will make do. I did inquire about a bigger room and since we are heading into the weekend, I suspect I will hear crickets on that front. It’s OK. Our friend Steve thinks this is the best hotel he has ever stayed in. My seeding his doubt on that front does not seem to sway him and there is lots to commend the joint. Steve does not want me to offend Skip and Kaz by denigrating their choice of hotels for our upscale visit and I do not. I would have, a priori, chosen it too based on reputation, but I’m just saying, at €€€€ prices, they should add a few square meters to the rooms (not gonna happen at this point). But….I checked the exchange rate at the front desk and they are selling up to €300 per day per guest at 1.04 so I will be hitting that bid every day to make up for the room size at this Mandarin lemon.