If your biggest ask on your next vacation is an extra towel, you may discover you’ve been wildly underplaying your hand.
The world’s top hotels pride themselves on making the impossible possible. But what happens when guests decide to put that promise to the test?
Such as? How about sunset on demand? Snow in the tropics? Breakfast with a giraffe? For luxury hotel GMs, these wonderfully absurd requests present a rather unique challenge: Just where do you draw the line when your brand is built on saying yes?
As the number of UHNWIs continues to grow (by 2030, Altrata forecasts the global ultra wealthy population will be up by 31 percent from H1 2025), so too does the appetite for once-in-a-lifetime experiences that money might – just might – be able to buy. In part, the luxury hospitality industry has created its own predicament. For years, it’s been assuring loyal guests that nothing is too much trouble. After all, the hallmark of great hospitality is making the improbable feel effortless – even if that comes at the unfortunate expense of the staff working behind the scenes to, metaphorically speaking, deliver the Moon on a stick.
So, what are some of the most lavish requests ever received? At Villa D’Este in Lake Como, a delegation that was renting out an entire floor once asked for “all of the furniture to be removed, so they could replace it with [furnishings from their] own palace,” the GM says. They arrived at the hotel with “three trucks full of furniture” and staff transformed the entire floor to mirror the interiors of the guests’ home (which kind of defeats the point of staying in such a storied establishment).
Another family, who had booked out the entire hotel and its residences for a few days, insisted there be “no white or yellow flowers” anywhere across the property. It was an awkward request, considering those colors have been in Villa D’Este’s signature floral scheme for decades. Nevertheless, the hotel obliged – replacing the extravagant displays at a cost of approximately $30,000 (charged to the guests, of course.)
Meanwhile, over at Hôtel Barrière Le Majestic in Cannes, one guest was disappointed to discover that there was no padel court. No problem: the hotel swiftly resolved the issue by renting a nearby villa, rapidly redesigning its interiors to the guest’s specifications, and “converting the property’s tennis court into a padel court,” says the hotel’s GM. Requests for multimillion-dollar suite renovations, he says, are also routine.
Across the Atlantic at Jade Mountain in Saint Lucia, owner Karolin Troubetzkoy has fielded some requests that are harder to accommodate. She recalls one guest who was “absolutely determined that a monkey should deliver the engagement ring during his proposal.” There was just one slight problem: “Saint Lucia does not really have monkeys – but even had we found one, we had all kinds of horrifying visions of it disappearing with the ring.” The resolve? “We spent considerable time persuading the gentleman that the lady in question would find it far more meaningful if he presented the ring himself. In the end, romance prevailed over the monkey – and, fortunately, the ring remained safely in human hands.”
On another occasion, a guest asked whether the hotel could “arrange for a limousine to drive them up Gros Piton.” As you may know, Gros Piton is a steep mountain trail, not a road, and “even the most ambitious limousine would not make it past the starting point.” The impossible request did, however, inspire the hotel’s ‘hiking butler’ experience. «If we could not provide a limousine,» Troubetzkoy says, «we could at least bring limousine-style pampering to the mountain.”
Now, if all these stories prove one thing, it’s this: If you don’t ask, you definitely won’t get. Even if what you’re asking for is, say, a camel in a tuxedo (Ooh, that’s a thought…).
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