A truly lovely read, Emma! To answer your question, “where in the world you have felt most welcome” — I was in London staying at St James Court by Taj, it isn’t a boutique property but the personalised service from their FOH staff and their concierge felt so delightful. What happened was this: We reached the hotel super early (around 8:30 AM) after a red-eye flight from India. Ofcourse a room wasn’t available at that time because it was several hours before check-in time. Instead of sending us out in the wild to “explore the city in the meantime” they pointed out that nothing meaningful would be open that early and promptly escorted us to their breakfast buffet and seated us in a quaintly hidden courtyard. Later, their concierge suggested we move our Bicester Village shopping day on our itinerary forward since it was a Friday, the crowds would be less, and if we took the morning train out to Bicester Village we’d reach there by 11 AM when stores would just be opening. Fantastic reasoning tbh. He even mapped the route, stations etc. for us. Overall, it ended up being a veryyy good use of our time!
A truly lovely read, Emma! To answer your question, “where in the world you have felt most welcome” — I was in London staying at St James Court by Taj, it isn’t a boutique property but the personalised service from their FOH staff and their concierge felt so delightful. What happened was this: We reached the hotel super early (around 8:30 AM) after a red-eye flight from India. Ofcourse a room wasn’t available at that time because it was several hours before check-in time. Instead of sending us out in the wild to “explore the city in the meantime” they pointed out that nothing meaningful would be open that early and promptly escorted us to their breakfast buffet and seated us in a quaintly hidden courtyard. Later, their concierge suggested we move our Bicester Village shopping day on our itinerary forward since it was a Friday, the crowds would be less, and if we took the morning train out to Bicester Village we’d reach there by 11 AM when stores would just be opening. Fantastic reasoning tbh. He even mapped the route, stations etc. for us. Overall, it ended up being a veryyy good use of our time!