Meanwhile, it is accepted that any hotel offering few facilities other than a faulty kettle and two stained cups may rebrand itself as "boutique" simply by investing in some hideous wallpaper. Smaller and more distasteful than "boutique" is the "intimate" hotel, wherein guests must hear the owner's life story several times over.

Most of us are now wise to the fact that the "flashpacker hotel" indicates a tolerance of soft drugs and that the "business" hotel simply denotes that there is an in-room pornography channel and a broken fax machine. Then there is the "eco-hotel", whose questionable environmental credentials amount to not replacing bath towels and a long-abandoned organic herb garden in the car park.

Neither do room descriptions make any sense. Only in the perverse dictionary of hotel speak is the "superior" room in fact "inferior": a small broom cupboard, overlooking rubbish bins, that's a step down from the "deluxe", which is identical but for offering starched white towelling robes so abrasive they cause instant rashes.