What Luxury Hotels Get Wrong (And How the Best Ones Fix It)

Give me a martini, and I'll wax poetic about hotels. I have spent the better part of my career helping people find the right ones — and part of that job means meeting annually with hotel sales directors and asking hard questions.

These are not hypotheticals. They are the pet peeves I see repeatedly, from fellow advisors, from our clients, from my own stays. Five-star failures that exist entirely because someone wasn't paying attention.

Take the 1 Hotel Hanalei Bay in Kauai. Gorgeous property. Unbeatable location. It was on my personal must-see list for years. Then the reports started coming in: forgotten room service, housekeeping arriving mid-afternoon, pool service that seemed optional, a concierge that responded with crickets. I stopped recommending it. That is what consistent service failure costs a hotel — not one bad review, but the quiet removal from every advisor's shortlist.

A hotel earns its star rating in the design phase. It keeps it in the details.

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The Chair Game

You finish breakfast, walk out to the pool, and scan row after row of loungers. Every single one has a book, a pair of sunglasses, or a carelessly folded towel draped across it. Heart sinking, you make a mental note to set an alarm tomorrow. You are at a luxury hotel charging upwards of $1,000 a night, and you are plotting your poolside real estate strategy like it is a competitive sport.

This is entirely solvable. Grand Velas Los Cabos handles it well: guests give their name and room number when claiming a chair, which is held for 30 minutes before items are removed if the lounger stays unoccupied. Most importantly, they actually enforce it. The policy without follow-through is just a laminated sign. Four Seasons Naviva is another property that manages this gracefully — you never have to play the chair game there.

Light Switches That Require a Degree

There is an inverse relationship between a guest's ability to turn on a light and the hotel's average daily rate. The more expensive the room, the more likely you will spend the first two evenings navigating a wall panel that belongs in an air traffic control tower.

During a recent stay at the One & Only Mandarina in Mexico, my family spent every evening in semi-darkness because we could not decode the lighting system. On our last morning, we discovered a skylight with its own dedicated switch — which had been there the entire time. A brief room orientation at check-in costs nothing. The alternative is guests quietly resenting a property they otherwise loved.

Charging for Water at the Restaurant

Our hotel folio at a certain five-star property in Los Cabos had restaurant bills that stopped me mid-scroll. The culprit: bottled water charged at every meal, at on-property dining venues, for guests already paying resort rates. We started carrying plastic bottles from the room to the restaurant. My environmentally conscious heart died a little each time.

If the tap water is unsuitable for guests — and in many destinations, it is — that is a property infrastructure issue, not a guest problem. Bottled water at on-site dining should be included. The cost of doing otherwise is the goodwill you lose every time a guest stares at that line item and feels nickeled.

Slow Pre-Arrival Communication

I work with hotel concierges constantly — coordinating welcome amenities, booking restaurants, arranging private transfers, sourcing the hard-to-get things. Legacy concierges are worth their weight in gold. When a hotel takes three days to reply to an email and answers only half my questions, I know they are not taking the advisor relationship seriously. And the advisor relationship is a pipeline of returning guests.

The contrast is the concierge team at the Lanesborough in London. They reach out proactively. They remember my clients. They provide service the guest didn't know they needed before they needed it. Recently, they sourced sold-out tickets to the V&A's Marie Antoinette exhibition for a client who had mentioned it once, in passing. That level of attention wins loyalty that no press coverage can manufacture.

Housekeeping After 1pm

I worked housekeeping for two summers at my family's hotels. A well-staffed team does not need until 3pm to turn a room. We travel with children who are up by 6am, eat breakfast early, and want to be back in the room by noon for a rinse and a change. Returning to an unmade room when you want clean towels and fresh sheets is demoralizing in a way that is disproportionate to the inconvenience — because it signals that the hotel doesn't know where you are, or doesn't care.

The Amans of the world have solved this quietly: they notice you've gone to breakfast, and the room is turned before you return. No request, no tracking, no app. Just attention. That is the standard. Everything else is catching up.

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The Bottom Line

None of these are design problems. They are not location problems or budget problems. They are attention problems — and the hotels that solve them are the ones that stay on every advisor's shortlist, year after year, regardless of what opens next.

Planning a luxury trip and want to know which properties actually deliver? Reach out to us at info@alpenglowtravel.com — we ask these questions so you don't have to.