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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.”

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Back at 12. “Ahh, Matt, you shouldn’t have. How cheesy,” says Sarcastic Wife. There on the table is a beautiful long-stemmed rose (they haven’t just nipped out to the bloke with the rose bucket on the promenade) in a single-stem vase.


THE NEXT morning, it’s time for the discretion test. Fake Wife phones the hotel sounding furious. She’s not sure I’m staying there, and she’s not sure if I’m with my floozy or not. Would the hotel cover for me?

“Hello, is my husband staying there?” says Fake Wife, sounding very angry.

“What is his name, madam?” asks the receptionist.

“Matt Rudd.”

“Yes, he is.”

“Is there anyone with him?”

“Yes, he’s sharing with a Harriet Perry.” And so Fake Wife gets put straight through.Great service for scorned wives. Disastrous for errant husbands.


REAL WIFE and I set off for a sightsee, leaving the room in a state that would embarrass a teenager: clothes strewn across the floor, unemptied bath, lipstick on the mirror, underpants lost in the bottom of the bed. A pair of sandals has become separated, so much so that one is in the bathroom and the other is alone by the (dirty) window.

When we return, the lipstick’s gone and the pants have escaped, but I’m by no means amazed by the room service. The clothes are now strewn in a corner, rather than all over the room (the teenage approach to tidying) — I was hoping they would have hung everything up. The sandals are still sad and separated. And what’s this? Special toiletries? No, it’s the maid’s cleaning fluid, left in the bathroom. Tsk tsk.

Our room sports a flashy Bang & Olufsen CD player, but no CDs. I’m quite happy playing with the clever opening sensor (just wave at it and the glass doors part), but Saucy Wife is feeling romantic. She wants some romantic music. “We don’t have a CD library,” apologises Leia when we call down.

“But if it’s an emergency, I can go to my car.” That really is impressive personal service. Fortunately, it’s not an emergency: we go out to dinner instead — at Botafumeiro, one of Barcelona’s best, booked just five hours earlier by the concierge.


BACK AT a fashionably Spanish 2am and we’re ordering breakfast. “I’d like two poached eggs on toast — make sure it’s not soggy — bacon without the rind, grilled tomatoes with grated cheese, English breakfast tea with semi-skimmed milk, a selection of pastries and fresh orange juice,” says she.

“And I’d like a cheeseburger, medium rare,” say I, with an Elvis lilt. There’s only a slight pause at the other end of the line. Then a friendly chuckle, “Would you like fries with that?” Full marks. This guy’s heard it all before.

Sadly, the actual breakfast is not as good as the ordering process. My burger is spot-on, but Picky Wife picks problems: no bacon for starters, the tomato is on the poached eggs, the cheese isn’t on the tomato, and they’ve only gone and brought Earl Grey instead of English breakfast. At £55, we’d expected better.

I do love the fact, though, that they called to say breakfast was on its way. Most hotel breakfasts just turn up unannounced, meaning a horrible start-of-the-day scramble for the bathrobe. Here, we were warned. Nice.

Check-out is marvellous. They haven’t charged for the rose (either an accident or a touching touch) and when I explain we’re flying home no-frills, Miriam doesn’t hesitate to help with the ordering of a posh packed lunch. The only problem is that the two boxes our wonderful picnic comes in are almost too big for the plane. But you can hardly fault them for that, can you?

In fact, unless you’re as picky as we were, you can’t fault them for much at all. They’re very, very good — but they’re just not the best in the world. And that’s not just because of the lack of ostrich feathers.

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