Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond the Lobby

You’re poolside at one of the world’s most luxurious getaways, gazing over the elevated infinity pool at the bustling city 57 storeys below. Sound like heaven? You might feel slightly differently if you were in charge of the 10,000 towels generated by the Marina Bay Sands’ guests. Writer Giles Coren and chef Monica Galetti meet the hotel staff for whom your escapism is their full-time job.

Restaurant writer Giles Coren and chef Monica Galetti head to the Andean Cloud Forest of Ecuador to work at Mashpi Lodge, a $10-million modernist hotel featuring a gondola cable car that whizzes guests a mile through the jungle canopy at a dizzying height. Which might explain why 70% of the staff are former loggers, who have become proud conservationists since taking on roles at Mashpi.

Food writer Giles Coren and chef Monica Galetti discover Giraffe Manor, a unique hotel where giraffes, staff and guests coexist in a hunting lodge on the edge of Nairobi National Park. Impressing Giles and Monica is a tall order after their years in the hospitality industry, but Giraffe Manor succeeds by offering them the unforgettable chance to breakfast with giraffes in the hotel dining room.

Attention to detail is key at Royal Mansour. The hotel, built by royal decree on an unlimited budget by Marrakech’s finest artisans, is frequented by world leaders, celebrities and billionaires who expect the best. Monica learns to ‘show love to curtains’ – 350 pairs of which must be caressed by hand to create perfect pleats. And Giles dons a butler uniform to administer to his guests’ whims.

Perched on top of zig-zagged stilts like the nearby fishermen’s houses, stands the remote Fogo Island Inn. Giles Coren and Monica Galetti meet the staff of this unique hotel in Newfoundland that pays homage to the European settlers that arrived from Ireland and Devon to fish cod here. They hope to revive the fortunes and folklore of their island home and forge a new future from its fishing past.

Giles Coren and Monica Galetti don their thermals and extreme weather gear, and trek 200km north of the Arctic Circle to Sweden’s Lapland, where they enter a magical world of snow, ice, inky-blue skies, and Icehotel. Before bedding down in freezing temperatures, there’s work to be done – rooms to be carved, drinking glasses to be hewn and the local delicacy of reindeer meat to be prepared.