From designer lipstick to green camel statues: what luxury hotels are doing to make guests feel special

When Randi Friedman walked into her room at Las Alcobas, a boutique hotel in St Helena, California, she felt like every detail had been planned just for her.

The layout offered unobstructed views of the vineyard outside. The balcony had a gas fire pit and two rocking chairs; the fire could be turned on with the press of a button.

Waiting at the minibar was a French press with a tiny jar of coffee next to it. The grounds were already measured; all she had to do was pour them into the press in the morning.

In her bathroom shower was a bar of handcrafted, grapefruit mimosa soap made locally by Napa Soap, which she could take home as a souvenir.

“I walked away feeling like I was taken care of,” said Friedman, a frequent traveller who works for Hearst Magazines in Manhattan, “like this hotel actually cared about me with the extra touches.”

Gone are the days when it was enough for a hotel to have rain shower heads and high thread-count sheets. In a world where there are more hotels to choose from than ever, luxury and business accommodation are focusing on the extras to set their hotels apart from the rest, said Barak Hirschowitz, president of the International Luxury Hotel Association.

“Great luxury hotels since the late 1800s have always focused on innovation and tiny details,” Hirschowitz said. “Cesar Ritz, considered by many the grandfather of the modern luxury hotel, was the first to introduce a bathroom in every room in 1893 at the Grand Hotel in Rome. Today, you wouldn’t imagine a hotel room without a bathroom, but back then it was a small detail that changed the industry.”

These days, he says, it’s other things that impress guests – such as floor lighting that activates when the guest steps out of bed to help guide them to the bathroom.