The world's best service?
Barcelona's Hotel Arts has won the Ultimate Service Award. Matt Rudd checks in to see if it deserves it

Our room’s not available?” I bellow in panto-horror. I don’t believe it. It’s 12.15pm, we’re all tired from our early flight, and our room’s not available.
I’ve got seriously high expectations. This is Barcelona’s Hotel Arts, after all. It’s just won the overall global prize at the Ultimate Service Awards (“the only global award scheme to recognise and applaud outstanding service”). According to the guests who voted, this hotel’s service is unparalleled.

So I want the receptionist wafting me with ostrich feathers. I want a harpist on call every time my blood pressure breaks 120. I want smothering. I want pampering. I want love.

Priscilla, our guest ambassador, is lovely, but she doesn’t have any ostrich feathers. Nor will she give us a high-floor, nonsmoking, king-size room immediately. The three of us chew the fat a bit. We can have a second-floor room now — or wait three hours for a coveted level 18 job.

“Go on, there must be a room,” I say, like a broken record. “I specifically requested a high-level room.”

“I’m sorry, Mr Rudd. I just can’t. Check-in is at 3pm”.

Bang. She’s blown it. It was all going so well. We’d turned up three hours early on a busy bank holiday. She’d give me a room, but not the one I wanted. Irritating, but fair enough; I haven’t got a leg to stand on. I’ve arrived too early to have a leg to stand on. We all know that, so why did she have to point it out?

Stroppy Wife isn’t quite stamping her feet but she does say that if she can’t have her room now, she wants to shower and change now instead. If I were Priscilla, I’d probably give her a slap, but it’s no problem — she’s whisked off to the changing room to ablute. I’m ushered into the beautiful lobby and furnished with lashings of mint water by the wonderfully smiley, ray-of-light Sergi. They’re making the best of a bad start.


TO WHILE away the wait, I try to annoy the concierge. A concierge, of course, is the key to a good hotel. A good concierge will get you the best table in town, fix the best entertainment and be able to arrange anything, absolutely anything, you need to improve your holiday.

Let’s start with the impossible. “Can you arrange a table at El Bulli tonight?” I ask.

El Bulli, an hour or so outside Barcelona, is considered by many to be the world’s best restaurant. Bagging a table with six hours’ notice would be trickier than sorting a seat beside the net judge at the Wimbledon men’s final... always worth a try, though.

“I like a challenge, sir, but for El Bulli, it is impossible,” says the concierge. “It opens for reservations on January 20, I think, and books up for the whole year on the same day.” Fair enough... she’s a concierge, not a magician. Let’s go to the opera instead.

“I want good seats at a good opera.” Her colleague comes over to help. In a whisker of a second, he’s on the phone and then he’s off again, with two stalls seats for tonight’s splendid Götterdämmerung.

Impressive, but I’ve come over all fickle: “Actually, I can’t face Wagner. I think we’ll just try some tapas.”

And so, without any eye- rolling or drawing of breath, he marks up a nice little map with some favourite tapas bars. Top marks for the concierge desk.


BACK FROM lunch at four and our room’s ready, praise the Lord. Our bags are up there, says the receptionist. No, they’re not. One of them arrives seconds after we do, but the chap’s forgotten the other three. Shame, because the porter had been so masterful on arrival. Like a world-champion sheepdog, he’d coaxed us gently from the taxi, separated us from our cluttered clobber, rounded us into the lift and returned promptly to his desk, ready for the next unruly flock.

Lack of bags is not the only problem: I don’t like the room. It’s on the 18th floor, but our view is mainly of the neighbouring skyscraper. What did I expect to see out of a seafront Barcelona hotel window? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically? Maybe Torquay? No, but the sea would be nice.

And the window’s dirty.

“The window’s dirty and I can only see a bit of the sea,” I explain on the phone.

“The window is like that because we are by the sea,” says the woman, as if she’s said it before. “You have a good room: you’re on the 18th floor; some people are on the 2nd. At your rate, you cannot have a room at the front.” It’s true, I’m only paying £207 a night. That’s not enough to see the sea. I’d have to splash out £1,290 to bag an available sea-view suite. “For two of you, it’s not worth it, sir.” Also true.

We’ve reached an impasse. She doesn’t have a better room and she hasn’t got an 18-storey-high ladder to clean the window. I have no choice but to settle for a dirty-windowed room with only a partial sea view. I was going to complain about the art, but I don’t have the heart.


NEXT PROBLEM with the global winner of the Ultimate Service Award: I can’t find the hotel directory. You know, the one that tells you all the wonderful services the hotel has to offer.

“It’s being reprinted, sir,” says another person on another phone. “Just dial zero if there’s anything you need.” How do I know what I need if I haven’t got a list of things I can be needy about? I dial zero anyway. Nothing. I dial it again. Still nothing. So I dial 1 and set the phone alarm off.

I can’t stop it.

I press the reception button and the receptionist tries to help by asking me to press a button on the wall. A while later, we realise we’re at cross-purposes. She’s trying to help me turn a room alarm off, but it’s the phone that’s alarming. Up comes an engineer, presses something I hadn’t thought of pressing and the alarm stops. I dial zero and someone’s there, ready, I suppose, to cater for my every whim. But the only whim I have now is to have a siesta.
9pm. We’re off for our Wagner-free tapas crawl, but I sneak back to the front desk. “Can you arrange a single red rose in our room for when we return?” The concierge should say, “No, you cheesy slimeball, why should I be a part of your sordid seduction.” Instead he says: “Sir, the florist has gone home, but we will do everything to make that possible.”