The Manor House Hotel, Castle Combe - as English as it comes.

Castle Combe, is one of the loveliest of English villages but it’s just so pretty it looks like a film set. No surprise then it’s been the location for many films (e.g. War Horse, Wolfman, Poirot, Dr Doolittle).  But take away the hoards of tourists visiting every day, and it’s rather dead. Like a film set you half expect the rear of the quaint cottages to be just wooden supports.

Consistent with this “chocolate box” village, the Manor House hotel is also a pin up for the tourist industry. Arrival by car is the best approach as automatic entrance gates smoothly open to entice you along a short parkland drive to reveal a magnificent English Manor House, complete with union jack flag fluttering from a pole on a perfectly mown stripped lawn.

Understandably, this stunning setting means the hotel is a somewhat of a wedding factory, and if your arrival is on afternoons from Thursdays to Sundays, expect to rub shoulders with noisy wedding parties competing for photos shots at the entrance.

Inside the main building, open fireplaces, wood panelling, flag stones, antique furniture (some tatty) all add to the ambience, and although the main bar is small there are other period rooms to sit and sip your Sherry.  No one can fault the setting of this quintessentially English hotel.  But that’s where the English bit stops as most of the front of house staff come from other parts of the world.

The Manor House Suites and Cottages are sumptuous but the Mews cottages are really just medieval themed motel rooms crammed full with too much furniture.
The big Nooooooooo! was the ghastly pink soft toy pig strategically placed in the bedrooms.
This naff cousin of Miss Piggy is obviously meant to replace the traditional “Do No Disturb” sign, but seriously could this luxury 5* hotel not think of anything more classy?

The Manor House hotel boasts a Michelin star for cuisine, and having previously experienced bizarre food and mean portion sizes from other holders of this accolade, I was wary or their culinary offerings.  My worries were totally unfounded.  Dinner was excellent and the amuse bouche the best I ever tasted to date.

To be picky, I don’t really like waiters giving you lengthy dish explanations of the food just served.  Firstly, it rudely interrupts your conversation with your fellow dinners and secondly, if English isn’t their first language the result is total confusion – I never found out exactly what post war cheese was!

Hilton London Heathrow Airport Terminal 5

The bizarre thing about the new Hilton T5 is that it isn’t exactly located at London Heathrow Terminal 5.  Not in the sense you can just walk out of the hotel into the terminal building. Admittedly, the hotel is only 2 miles away and served by a frequent shuttle bus, but the truth is being somewhat stretched here to attract the lucrative Heathrow business traveller market.

You arrive at Hilton T5 having initially circumnavigated a scruffy airport cargo area, making this smart hotel seem out of place.  Yet, this is a nicely designed hotel with everything the business traveller might need; standard bedrooms are well soundproofed against aircraft noise and are a good size.  Meeting rooms are equipped with the latest hi-tech A.V., and there’s even a large garden/patio outside area.

The main function room can hold over 1,000 people and has a good ceiling height aided by retractable chandeliers.  Although the room lacks any daylight, the conservatory pre-function area compensates for this.

Mr Todiwala's Kitchen

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In addition to the main hotel catering area is a “celebrity restaurant” – Mr Todiwala’s Kitchen. Wonderful for  fans of pan-Indian cuisine.  Central to this  lovely room is a life size wooden elephant.  Specially carved for the hotel and flown in. At least it didn’t have far to travel on arrival at LHR.

London's Livery Halls

For those in the know, London’s Livery Halls make fabulous unique venues for meetings, weddings, parties and dinners, and many are catered for by the City’s top catering companies. 

Vintners Hall

Livery Hall - Haberdashers

There are more than one hundred Livery Halls in the City of London representing practically every craft or trade. The Livery Halls tend to consist of, a main Livery Hall and a Council Chamber. Most are steeped in history and tradition and only until relatively recently have they opened their doors to the venue hire market.

Two favourites are, Vintners Hall and Haberdashers’ Hall. Both Halls suffered after the Great Fire of London (1666) and whilst Vintners still retains many of its beautifully crafted features, Haberdashers had an impressive new Hall built in 2001.

Haberdashers' Hall Courtyard

Uniquely, both venues have outside spaces; Vintners Hall has a small rooftop drinks area with views over to St Paul’s Cathedral, whilst Haberdashers has a wonderful outside courtyard complete with fountain making a great space for summer cocktail receptions and barbeques.

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The Venue Guru is a name given for reviews of business venues that as a professional, I have inspected personally or used for meeting and events.  The venues reviewed are in the UK or mainland Europe and these reviews are from a meeting and event planners perspective.  I have no links with any hotels or venue marketing consortia and the reviews expressed are my own opinions. I hope you find them useful.

Corinthia, London

The Corinthia London is the first UK hotel for this Maltese owned hotel chain. Despite being advertised as, “perfectly located” (few minutes walk from Embankment tube station), I failed to find it straight away. Feeling somewhat embarrassed, I eventually had to ask the bowler-hated doorman at the Horseguards hotel for directions, only to find the building opposite I’d assumed was an Embassy due to the flags outside, was in fact the Corinthia.

The Corinthia exudes class and on arrival you are greeted by smartly dressed, helpful front of house staff attending the spacious lobby. The designers have done a great job with this triangular shaped building.  The quality of design and finish is exceptional and their pièce de résistance is the beautiful £1.2m Baccarat crystal chandelier dominating the lobby.

The 294 bedrooms I would describe as comfortable luxurious without being ostentatious. There’s lots of marble in the well-appointed bathrooms but I did like the built-in TVs at the end of the baths!  The Royal Suite was still to be completed and when finished will be the largest in London.

The Corinthia has 6 averaged-sized meeting rooms of a superior standard and an attractive Ballroom with pre function area holding 400 for a drinks reception and 400 for a theatre style presentation.

Amongst its varied food and beverage areas, the Corinthia also boasts the city’s longest Piano Bar. A popular option for business groups is the elegant semi private dining areas above the Corinthia’s two in-house restaurants. There’s also a unique private dining room for up to 16 guests complete with Chef’s kitchen located off Massimo’s Restaurant and Oyster Bar.

The Corinthia’s General Manager said he employs new hotel staff based on their “can-do” attitude rather than just their skills alone, and this definitely shows.

  

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The Venue Guru is a name given for reviews of business venues that as a professional, I have inspected personally or used for meeting and events.  The venues reviewed are in the UK or mainland Europe and these reviews are from a meeting and event planners perspective.  I have no links with any hotels or venue marketing consortia and the reviews expressed are my own opinions. I hope you find them useful.

Why are buffet breakfasts in business hotels such bun fights?

I blame the Architects. If you build a hotel in a city centre with 200 bedrooms and the hotel’s main clientele are business people, weekdays between 07.00 and 8.00, potentially 200 people will all want breakfast at the same time. Result chaos.  In this age of free seating at breakfast, your hotel restaurant may have the capacity for 200 guests in tables of twos and fours, but who wants to share and make conversation at that time of day with people you don’t even know.

It’s happened on many occasions when having collected my food items, I find there’s hardly anywhere to sit.  Usually, I’m confronted with a sea of business suits of the male variety tucking in to the all-inclusive buffet breakfast.  Let me just say, I’ve nothing against men (I’m married to one) but as a lone female faced with this scene, the dilemma is whom do you choose to sit with?

Get it wrong, and your request to sit down to next to an unsuspecting male could look like a come-on.  Plus any colleagues arriving later could misinterpret the situation as: is this the morning after the night before? – Know what I mean!  Sit with a non-English speaker and you’ll find it takes two hands to do sign language, not easy when you’re stuffing your face with croissants.  And don’t ask a colleague from the US why they didn’t knock you up in the morning or you’ll be in for an industrial tribunal. 

I don’t expect any special treatment and would hate a restaurant with a “female seating only” area – how dull! But why is it when I’m dressed in business attire do people assume I work for the hotel? Complaining to me about the lack of plates or the fact the orange juice has run out.

Hotel buffet breakfasts are set out like factory production lines to efficiently guide guests through the multinational breakfast offerings, until finally arriving at the baskets of buns. Sadly the reality is you’ll stand for ages behind early departing leisure tourists whilst they slowly fill up their plates.  Like participating in a treasure hunt, you go from one place to another seeking out breakfast accoutrements, finding surprisingly the butter’s by the hot plate.  Obvious really - to thaw out!

 Not being an IT expert I always have trouble working out how to use the hot beverages machine, but cappuccino and tea are not so bad together. Eventually, you’ll return to your seat weighed down by a mountain of food, asking yourself, do I really want all this? But fear not, because you’ll get a work out endlessly returning to the buffet to retrieve items you’ve forgotten.  However, not in my case, thanks to my catering training I do show off by carrying four plates at a time, this useful skill greatly reduces my buffet breakfast footprint.

The buffet breakfast has been a triumph for hotels.  No longer do they require volumes of staff to serve multiple breakfast items to guests arriving en masse. Restaurant staff are now relegated to being mere witnesses whilst hotel guests render the once beautiful buffet breakfast display to a closing time jumble sale.  The alternative to avoiding the breakfast buffet bun fight is Room Service but that’s another story...

London 2012 - Meeting the Olympic demands

Not many Brits thought London would win the bid to host the Olympic Games in London in 2012.  In reality, many of us simply weren’t interested. 

We complained how expensive the Games would be with all the upheaval involved in the city’s infrastructure. Besides, London had already hosted the Olympic Games in 1948; we thought another city should show its merits.  Paris was the strong favourite; they’d never held the Games before, were really enthusiastic, and had got lots of T-shirts printed announcing “Paris 2012”.

Consequently, on the 6^th July 2005 13.00 BST, few Brits had bothered to tune into the announcement from Singapore declaring the winning city …… London! No one was more dumbstruck than the French or amazed than the British.  The resulting belated euphoria in London was akin to the UK winning the medals table.

For the meeting and events planner, the London 2012 Olympic Games are a double-edged sword.  Firstly, we’re finding in some cases meeting/event space next year is restricted in the months running up to Games because the major Olympic sponsors have block booked large numbers of bedrooms and function areas. We also need to inform the authorities if we are holding an event in London with over 500 attendees during this period, and corporate hospitality can only be provided by three “official” agencies. However, London has some excellent new hotels opening in time for the Games, including international brand hotels new to London (Corinthia, Shangri-La, W Hotels).

 

In addition, opening May 2011 the 5* deluxe Renaissance St Pancras, London, becomes the flagship of the Renaissance group in Europe. This former grand station hotel and landmark building is a stunning renovation.  The old booking office has been converted into a trendy bar, the ornate “ladies smoking room” has been transformed into a refined, period function room, but most impressive is the gothic staircase, a certain backdrop for wedding photography. 

And for train enthusiasts you can even book a bedroom overlooking the platforms.

Already in the UK this year we have set a new world record for high-speed bed making. A hotel housekeeper from Sheffield’s Premier Inn hotel tackled two pillows with pillowcases, a mattress cover, sheet, duvet cover and bed runner in just 95 seconds! 

   

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The Venue Guru is a name given for reviews of business venues that as a professional, I have inspected personally or used for meeting and events.  The venues reviewed are in the UK or mainland Europe and these reviews are from a meeting and event planners perspective.  I have no links with any hotels or venue marketing consortia and the reviews expressed are my own opinions. I hope you find them useful.

Hilton Doubletree Tower Hill, London formerly the MINT Hotel, City of London

**Since this Blog was published, the MINT Hotel group has been taken over by the Hilton DoubleTree chain.**
Not that long ago, there were hardly any hotels in the City of London, which was always surprising given the vast amount of business traffic in this area.  But now there is a fair selection of good quality hotels including the latest addition of the Hilton Double HOTEL, Tower Hill. 

This is the City’s largest hotel to date having 583 bedrooms, all of which are equipped with the latest iMacs doubling up as in-room TV and computer.  The narrow guest floor corridors present an institutional feel but bedrooms are attractive if functional, clearly stating this is more a business hotel rather than for leisure guests.

Addressing the CSR issue, the Hilton Doubletree HOTEL, Tower Hill has cleverly positioned itself as an Eco hotel.  In this case it means solar panels, roof gardens complete with beehives, energy saving lights and no plastic bottled water in the meeting rooms.  Best of all, all rooms have windows that open.

The Hilton Doubletree HOTEL, Tower Hill is located off Pepys Street and the contrast from this old fashioned, narrow street outside to the ultra modern, spacious atrium lobby is striking. Having so many bedrooms over 11 floors means the lifts are pretty busy but someone’s clearly thought out the layout as the dedicated meetings area is quickly accessed from the lobby by stairs. All the meeting rooms have floor to ceiling windows and they’ve added a row of 9 meeting booths for informal discussions or breakout groups. 

The WOW factor is the Sky Lounge on the 12^th floor, comprising of five meeting rooms, a stylish bar and two rooftop gardens complete with a BBQ area.  This is a fabulous place for summer events thanks to the superb views of the river Thames, Tower of London, and the Gherkin, but just watch out for the bees!

 www.eventoptions.com

Expert venue finding for business meetings and events

E-mail: enquires@eventoptions.com  Tel: +44 (0) 1483281426

The Venue Guru is a name given for reviews of business venues that as a professional, I have inspected personally or used for meeting and events.  The venues reviewed are in the UK or mainland Europe and these reviews are from a meeting and event planners perspective.  I have no links with any hotels or venue marketing consortia and the reviews expressed are my own opinions. I hope you find them useful