Three different prices for the same drink in the same bar!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

Years before Paris, Hilton Hotels represented exclusivity and class. Compared to the city’s modern skyline, the London Hilton on Park Lane now looks like a less-than-average tower block. As a young boy in the 1960s I saw it as a stunning skyscraper.

20 years later, as a precocious marketing whizz-kid, a client invited me to lunch at its rooftop restaurant.

I loved it. Everything felt special. My client was clearly well known to the staff and I left feeling altogether squiffy and rather bloomin’ splendid.

Had material matters mattered more to me, I would have felt that I’d truly made it.

Instead I chose scribbling and had no further contact with Hilton Hotels until a couple of weeks ago, when I stayed at the Watford Hilton.

Blue chip brands have two ways to go. They either hang on to the unique quality that made them what they are, or they diversify, diluting the brand into as many enterprises as might exploit a profit from the cachet of the name.

Fortnum and Mason and Waterford Crystal would be the former, while Hilton, as I discovered, represent the latter.

Every couple of months I visit my mum in London. Occasionally, when it’s not convenient for me to stay, with her, I go to a hotel. Last time my usual place was fully booked, but the internet came up with a reasonable rate at the Watford Hilton.

For some bizarre reason I just love saying it: Watford Hilton Watford Hilton. It tickles my funny bone, but as a guest it screwed with both my head and wallet and that doesn’t make for a happy man.

To be fair, all the staff I met (save one who failed to see past the rules) were absolutely splendid, my room was as clean and bland as any corporate hotel, and I had no complaints, until I went to the bar.

Much as I love my family, when I return to London from the silence of rural Ireland, the hammering hum of the big city combines with my Jewish family’s need to all communicate to each other, at once, all the time (myself included), to leave me a bit bewildered by the end of the first day

I long for a barstool in the hotel and a double Jameson.

Sadly, as is increasingly the way these days, there were no barstools, condemning the lone traveller to sit at a table. That night I didn’t care. I was tired after travelling and coming down from a fun full-on family dinner.

To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.