The Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc on the French Riviera now hands arriving guests a printed card of house rules: no photography at the pool, and disrespectful conduct toward staff or fellow guests is out. Longtime general manager Philippe Perd's team frames it as protecting the hotel's quiet glamour — but the underlying message is blunt. Luxury properties are increasingly having to manage the behaviour of the people who pay to stay in them.
A survey of general managers at some of the world's best hotels turned up a rogues' gallery neatly sorted into three categories: sex, money and ego. In Mexico, two couples hosting an orgy with hired sex workers in a five-star villa were caught mid-act by an attendant. Rather than apologise, they invented a cartel coercion story, filed a police report and demanded a full refund — and were refused. In the Maldives, an Eastern European couple booked the top villa near the seaplane jetty for an eight-month stay, then progressively abandoned clothing entirely, greeting newly arriving families from their pool in the nude. The resort quietly staffed their villa with personnel comfortable with the arrangement and asked them to stay indoors when planes landed. They rebooked the next year.
Money brings its own drama. Loyalty points have opened five-star resorts to guests more used to motels, and managers report buffet-picnicking and aggressive haggling as new normals. At a Riviera Maya resort, a $40,000-a-week guest, drunk in the pool, tried to recruit other guests into a class-action lawsuit after slipping on a wet floor, pressured the hotel doctor for valium and codeine, then sent a staffer to bulk-buy cheap white wine in the company car.
Ego rounds out the list. One travel agent instructed a hotel that its butler could never speak to clients directly — all requests had to route through the agent's WhatsApp, seven time zones away, including the green light to serve breakfast. Influencer culture is a particular headache: an Italian hotel owner flags any lunch guest carrying an oversized bag, which usually holds costume changes for an hours-long photo shoot faking an overnight stay.
The common thread is that none of this is insurmountable with a capable GM and an owner who backs the staff — operators like Ian Schrager and André Balazs get credit for exactly that. The truly unsolvable cases involve the owners themselves, like the collectibles tycoon who rearranged his luxury hotel's lobby furniture weekly because he preferred his own taste to the brand's.
For travellers, the takeaway is refreshingly simple: at the top end, the hotel is rarely the problem — the people beside you at the pool might be. If a flawlessly delivered holiday matters to you, properties that publish and enforce house rules are arguably a feature, not a restriction. And as a guest, the surest route to good service is still the old-fashioned one: be decent to the staff.
