Wake-up call — Hotel Oddity #46

Four Seasons wake-up call: great morning!

I recently had the great fortune to stay in the Four Seasons Hotel in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet district. The hotel is perfect. And, you know, I stay in a lot of hotels. A lot of good hotels, too. Rarely do I find perfection. Granted, perfection is expensive.

Requesting a 5 a.m. wake-up call, I was told there’d be coffee at my door when the phone rang. Wow! Wonderful! The concierge, a young man, said that Four Seasons had held a contest last year: what can we do to be different, beyond expectations, really stand out? Something like that. Coffee-with-wake-up-call was his submission. He said—proudly—that it’s now a practice at all Four Seasons Hotels. I’ll confirm that after my next stay at a Four Seasons.

At five o’clock in the morning the phone rang. A real human said good morning. And on a table outside my door, as promised, I found a tray with a cozy-covered thermos of coffee and to-go cups. All this in addition to the fact that the room contained a nifty espresso machine. Brilliant.