No matter how ‘insane’ your request is, chances are that if you are staying at a leading hotel, the concierge would make sure that your wish comes true.
“Working in this part of the world is not really easy. You have travellers here who are highly affluent and highly demanding,” says Charles Ferrer, who is the chief concierge at the five-star H-Hotel Dubai and president of Les Clefs d’Or UAE.
Ferrer said the weirdest request he ever had to fulfill was by a European guest, who demanded that he arrange a camel to pick his girlfriend from the airport. The difficulty was in getting the permissions from the municipal authorities and to make sure the dung left over by the camel is cleaned up. “It was weird, but we made it happen,” he said.
Randy Santos, chief concierge at Intercontinental Doha, and founder of Qatar Concierge Society, said arranging a camel ride is easy compared to the bizarre request he once got. “One of my guests insisted that he wanted to take a baby camel back home in Europe for his little niece,” he said. In the end, he managed to convince the client for a stuffed toy camel instead.
Khaled Kassem, chief concierge at Grand Millennium Dubai, said once he was left stumped when a guest requested a donkey ride for himself and his companion. “I thought to myself why would anyone want to ride a donkey in a place like Dubai, but I just got it done,” he said with a laugh.
Yasmin Maier, concierge agent at Four Seasons Hotel Doha, said she once had to arrange 40 bicycles for a family who insisted on taking bike rides under the scorching sun of the city.
Nargul Aripova, guest experience ambassador at Renaissance Doha City Center Hotel, said she once had to scan the entire city for “The Pearl Man,’ a pearl diver who makes jewellery, for a guest who insisted on meeting the man they had read about online.
Another Doha-based concierge, Andrew, said he once had to satisfy a request to find the ‘exact’ same laces for a pair of shoes that a client had bought from another country. “It turned out that one of our drivers had it,” he said.
While every hotel concierge had a story about camels, they also had some strange stories about male guests making demands for girls in their rooms.
A concierge said that while it is true that it is their job to accommodate the guest, their job description didn’t mean that they were pimps.
But how does the concierge deal with such requests? Dubai-based Charles Ferrer said: “We accommodate the requests that are within the bounds of morality and legality. When people request for companions, we generally recommend them places to go, but at the same time we tell them clearly that anything that transpires in that venue is beyond our control.”
But not all requests are sleazy in nature. Some requests can really change people’s lives if fulfilled.
Qatar Concierge Society’s Randy Santos shared a heart-warming story of an American soldier based in Iraq who once was staying with him at a hotel, but was not able to see his companion back home in the US on Valentines’ Day.
The soldier requested Santos just one night before the big day to arrange a flower and a small gift at an address in the US at 3:10pm. Santos said he made use of all his contacts to make the wish come true and when the soldier called his companion in front of him the next day at the exact time, tears were streaming down on his face. The soldier’s companion had in fact received the flower by 3pm, 10 minutes earlier on the promised day.
“That day I got a tip of $200. But I don’t consider that as a tip, it was reward for a job well done,” said Santos.
