Before online reviews, star ratings, guest photos and one-click complaints, choosing a hotel required a little more faith.
You looked at a brochure. You made a phone call. You trusted the description.
Then you arrived.
In Michael Pellegrini’s Certainly Sir. Up Yours!, that leap of faith leads straight to the Savoy Court Hotel in Margate, a family-run seaside hotel where the difference between the brochure and reality can be enormous and where almost anything that can go wrong eventually does.
The book takes readers back to the 1970s and 1980s, when British seaside hotels operated in a very different world. The Savoy Court has an old cage-style lift, bedrooms heated by electric fires, thin carpets, shared toilets and even shower cubicles placed directly inside bedrooms. Some rooms are fortunate enough to have their own television. At one point, the book jokes about an era when hotels could proudly advertise bedrooms with “hot and cold water.”
Today, a guest might photograph everything, upload it before dinner and have a review online by bedtime.
At the Savoy Court, there is nowhere quite so immediate to complain.
And that may be just as well.
Because the hotel’s problems are not limited to the décor.
The real attraction is the people.
At the centre is George Antonopoulos, the domineering proprietor who runs the hotel with enormous confidence and expects his family to fall into line. Around him are six children with very different attitudes toward work, a revolving collection of staff and Frank Tolley, the ex-RAF narrator whose outward professionalism is constantly at war with what he is really thinking.
Then come the guests.
One memorable turnover day sees three coachloads arrive at once, more than 160 people trying to check in while rooms are unfinished, keys are handed to the wrong guests, luggage piles up and the lift becomes overloaded and gets stuck between floors.
That is the Savoy Court experience in miniature: confusion followed by panic, followed by an improvised solution, followed by another problem.
Christmas is no safer. During one festive stay, a burst pipe sends water cascading through several floors of the hotel, damages rooms, brings down ceilings and causes a power failure that leaves guests trapped in the lift. Somehow, dinner still has to continue.
And all of this unfolds without TripAdvisor waiting in the background.
That makes Certainly Sir. Up Yours! more than a collection of outrageous hotel stories. It is also a comic time capsule of an era when hospitality depended far more heavily on reputation, brochures, coach companies, word of mouth and the ability of hotel staff to keep disasters from becoming tomorrow’s public review.
Pellegrini knows that world from experience. He spent 30 years in the hotel business, trained as a chef and grew up around hospitality after his father bought a hotel in Margate. He also makes clear that, while the characters are presented as fictional, many of the situations draw on things that really happened.
The result is rude, nostalgic, chaotic and unapologetically old-school.
Modern travellers may have review sites, ratings and endless comparison tools.
But before all that, there was the Savoy Court.
And judging by what happened there, perhaps ignorance really was bliss.
Available On Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HCLXVCL1/
