Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 30 Nov. - 6 Dec. 2000 Issue No.510

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Adrift in marmoreal halls

By Nigel Ryan

There is a lie that has grown up around five star hotels and it is that they are somehow luxurious. Those huge concrete boxes with hundreds upon hundreds of identical rooms, built these days by investors operating within an increasingly fragile real estate bubble and then leased to management companies that specialise in giving a marble veneer to the lowest common denominator (the international hotel chains exist, in reality, as multinational management companies) are an extreme example of standardisation, of a utilitarianism run wild.

One need only look at the exteriors to see the truth of this: the vast, twisted Rubic cube of the Ramsis Hilton rising in distressed concrete above the tangle of Abdel-Moneim Riyad, the unfortunate massing of the Semiramis the brutality of which is, if anything, emphasised rather than disguised by the fey pinkish terracotta paintwork.

Sometimes the siting of the building helps, as is the case with the Gezira Sheraton, which occupies the southern tip of the island, a site once earmarked for Cairo's new opera house. Sarwat Okasha, the former minister of culture, still has the architectural models for this project, designed by Walter Gropius. Its abortion deprived Cairo of an opportunity to acquire a building with an inbuilt guarantee that it would excite international interest -- an uncommon occurrence, to say the least. Yet mediocrity, as usual, won the day, and instead of the Gropius opera house we have a cylindrical multi-storey towerblock containing hundreds of near-identical rooms.

The impetus towards such ruthless standardisation is not too difficult to understand -- certainly not in commercial terms. Everything the same allows for a great many economies of scale. It also has the advantage of reducing the need for any form of thought, always a time consuming business. What is surprising, though, is that such off-the-peg formulas should retain, for so many, intimations of the bespoke.

But perhaps it is the purest nostalgia to think that every great city deserves something a little more bespoke than the run-of-the-mill chains. The last chance, probably, for city centre Cairo to have such an institution ended when the decision was made to demolish, rather than refurbish, the old Semiramis. And while the Heliopolis Hotel, once the largest in the world, still stands, having been sequestered along with other Belgium interests in the early sixties, it subsequently became a presidential palace.

Certainly elsewhere it is the non-standardised, the distinctive, the special, that is making a comeback. Smaller, boutique hotels, designed and marketed precisely on the distance they place between themselves and the chains, have opened in a great many cities, first in the US and major Western European cities, and now in other places, not least Beirut, one of Cairo's main regional competitors. And the great flagship hotels never quite went out of fashion in the cities that could afford them, politically as much as economically.

Currently, several new five star hotels are under construction or being planned in Cairo, among them a Hyatt Regency and a second Four Seasons. The new Meridien extension is also due to open in the next few months. And together these projects will result in a considerable increase in the number of hotel rooms that are, nominally at least, at the top end of the market.

The increase, on the surface, appears much needed -- just ask anyone who has tried to book a room at the last minute. Yet delve a little deeper and the picture becomes less clear. Only last week the economy pages of this paper carried a report outlining a reduction in the number of Arab tourists coming to Egypt, a major reason cited by interviewees being that they resented being charged more for their accommodation than tourists from the West.

One cannot, of course, read into this information an unfortunate lack of fraternal feeling on the part of hoteliers -- it is just that the bulk of Western tourists arrive in Egypt on packages organised by operators that have negotiated massive discounts on hotel accommodation, while Arab tourists do not. And the big hotel chains are all too happy to comply. It is just that they do not really want it publicised lest it tarnish their luxury image: just think of all those couples spending small fortunes on weddings in the hotels -- would they really be that happy to know that their hugely expensive, top-notch wedding was actually taking place in what is one of the bargain basements of mid-range mass tourism?

Is there room, then, in Cairo, for a hotel that really delivers its guests with those things that the five stars promise -- exclusivity, luxury, and a guarantee that things are being done in the best possible taste? And is it unreasonable to suppose that a hotel that actually offers -- and here I must resort to a curiously old-fashioned word -- charm, is a possibility, and an economically viable one at that?

For the moment, though, the logic of consumption requires it take place on a stage, and that stage almost inevitably consists of acres of marble or polished granite flooring, with a 24-hour cafeteria tucked away in a corner, serving pretentious assembly line food the only imaginative thing about which is the price. But charm -- does this sound a little too precious? -- requires a degree of discretion, or at least a retreat from the overly conspicuous. Unfortunately the marketing ploy that is a standard, five star rating, really does not include space for discretion. And so the charmless concrete tower blocks continue to go up, providing yet more rooms to be rented cheaply to package tourists, while the rest pay through the nose for the hollow caché attached to their provision of a very standard luxury.

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