A Bolder Bangkok Travel Update

..and 'Vous avez choisi?'...'Vous avez terminé?'

Anyone who has eaten out in a rural French restaurant will probably be familiar with these two phrases. One at the beginning of your dining experience and the other towards the end. Not much communication in between sadly..and so it is that I think that I may have solved the French pension deficit  solution. In most other countries as soon as you sit down in a restaurant you are given a mouth watering choice of drinks or indeed a local speciality that has literally just arrived from a local vineyard or brewery that morning. The answer is invariably yes, otherwise you probably wouldn’t be sitting in the restaurant. And so it is that by the time vous avez choisi vous avez already spent at least €10 - 20 on drinks. This doesn’t happen in France.

There are about 200,000 restaurants in France. Lets say they have 10 tables each and do lunch and dinner 200 days a year. Thats 2 million table sittings x 200 = 400 million. Multiply that by €20 and thats €8 billion annually - getting on for the GDP of a small country. Surely if Macron or whoever makes the law in France these days brought in a law saying you had to be offered a drink immediately upon being seated in a restaurant then the pension deficit woes would be sorted pretty quickly and France could then all retire as early as they like. They would just need to work a little harder in the meantime - but I doubt this is going to happen.

Photo by Alena Torgonskaya on Unsplash

It is early September and France like many other European countries is back at school - La Rentrée. Our local village is noticeably quieter as is our accommodation business. The best music act of the summer Monday night markets has performed and moved on - Phil Good. The last such market of the season was last week and now things really slow down as all the kids are back at school and a slightly older crowd takes over. The wonderful rock and jazz festivals that take place all over France during the summer start to plan ahead for the following year. The rugby season has already started and the great Parisian Olympic summer party has also come to an end.

Meanwhile on the other side of the world in Asia there are great things happening in the travel world and especially in Thailand where the iconic hotel the Dust Thani Bangkok re-opens after a few years of a complete rebuild. The old building was demolished and rebuilt in the same iconic style but bigger and greener. Some 33 years the ago the IMF World Bank meetings took place in Bangkok and this was a big moment for the then rapidly emerging country and a huge challenge to the city’s infrastructure which was notoriously sinking under the weight of endless traffic jams and no urban rail system yet ready. Depending on your car’s number plate ending (odd or even) you had to leave the car at home on alternate days to allow the international financial community to get around town.

My colleague Yvan and I being driven around Bangkok in a Mandarin Oriental limousine! (c1990)

For the preceding 10 years The Mandarin Oriental hotel had topped the annual Institutional Investor (II) magazine survey of the world’s best hotels and nothing would suggest that wasn’t going to be the case this year. In the months prior to the IMF meetings taking place my job, well a small part of it, had been to find a suitable nightclub for the famous II after dinner ‘dance’ that took place at every IMF meeting so I made countless trips (of course) from my Tokyo base to see if I could find the right club for a bankers disco! The then MD of the Dusit group Khun Khampi called me and said they would love to host the party at the Dusit Thani. They were opening a new videotheque called Bubbles and the whole event would be at their expense with endless caviar and champagne available to charm the assembled bankers. The general manager Danny McAfferty called me over for a meeting and asked me whether this would be mainly men in suits. I replied yes it would be. Isn’t that a bit weird he replied. Yes sort of. When the event was held every year in Washington many financiers brought their wives along. Perhaps the wives hadn’t received the invite to the Bangkok meetings for some mysterious reason. Anyway, don’t worry Nigel, leave it with me and I will see what I can do to ‘“balance out the room’ ! I suggested we leave the name of the new club off the official invitations and just mention the hotel not Bubbles Videotheque!

The new Dusit Thani

Just prior to the big week the September issue with the annual hotel survey came out and to everyones shock The Oriental (as it was known then) had been toppled from its habitual number 1 position and replaced by the young upstart down the road in Bangkok - The Regent (now Anantara). All a bit tricky as most of us from II were all due to stay at the Oriental. This was not going to deter us. Later in the week that the meetings were held a small celebration was arranged at The Regent hosted by then General Manager Bill Black and Resident Manager Roland Fasel who remains a good friend and now runs the excellent Maybourne brand: Claridges, The Connaught etc. The ‘after dinner’ party was duly held at Bubbles Videotheque and was a night to remember as not only did we sink under boatloads of caviar and champagne to celebrate the official opening of the club but Danny was indeed true to his word and the club was miraculously full of single Thai ladies alongside men in suits. It was quite a sight.

For those who have visited Bangkok and been stuck in the never ending traffic jams the Dusit Thani is at the crossroads of the city so, depending on your view of traffic congestion, a pretty good place to be based - not to mention being only a stones throw from the infamous Patpong ‘night market’. My own personal memories are of its excellent Vietnamese restaurant at a time when it was difficult to find Vietnamese food anywhere, even in Bangkok. But it was an ageing building and in need of a facelift. So it was duly demolished and a replica has been built in its place with the famous gold spire emblematic of Thailand. The Dusit Thani reopens at the end of September (all being well) and it will be a real thrill to get back to see it later this year. I wonder if Bubbles Videotheque is still there.