Frank Bowling: An eagle eye for hotel perfection

Frank Bowling takes his breakfast in a café rather than spend $15 on room service coffee, he introduces himself to the concierge (the most important person on the staff, he says) with a $20 bill upon checking in and when he leaves he packs the unused items from his bathroom affinity kit.

Familiar hotel behavior but Bowling is not your usual hotel guest. Since he began at the front desk of the Connaught in 1966 he has risen to become probably the world's leading grand hotel manager, leading also in the literal sense in that well-heeled guests followed him from the Connaught in London to the Ritz Carlton and Carlyle in New York and then to the Bel Air in Los Angeles, which he left five years ago to become a hotel consultant.

Like any traveler, Bowling is irritated by hotels that charge extra for the Internet and spa whether one uses them or not, and regrets that hotel lobbies are no longer comfortable lounges to meet friends or read a newspaper but have been turned into sales points for food and drink. He finds most room lighting inadequate for reading and usually asks for a stronger light bulb. He considers minibars a ripoff:

"Why not stock the minibar with mineral waters and soft drinks and don't charge for it?" he asks. "They cost pennies and you're paying at least $650 a night."

When he left the Bel Air, his friend Ali Kasikci at the Peninsula in nearby Beverly Hills appointed him the hotel's roving ambassador. Now that Kasikci is general manager of the Montage in Beverly Hills, to open in November, Bowling will be ambassador there.

This doesn't mean working on the day-to-day operation but using his sharp eye - "I have developed a sort of radar vision, I can spot a bobby pin under the bed the minute I walk in" - and his wide connections among clients and colleagues.

"I seem to know people all over the world - we went to school together or we bussed tables together or we washed dishes together. We have this fraternity." The general manager of the Hong Kong Four Seasons was a Connaught colleague, the managing director of the George V is a protégé from the Ritz Carlton and the managing director of Claridge's was his evening manager at the Carlyle.

Despite world economic woes, luxury hotels are running at 85 percent of capacity, Bowling says. The Montage, off Rodeo Drive, will be very luxurious indeed, with a bedroom costing at least $1.5 million to build. It is the first new grand hotel in Beverly Hills in 17 years and it is Bowling's first crack at creating a hotel from scratch. "The nice thing about opening a new hotel is that you get to put in your wish list. Everybody gets to put in what they couldn't have in their previous lives," Bowling says. Right now they are working on what he calls the fun part, which is choosing bed linens, bathroom amenities and uniforms.

He much admired the uniforms in a recent stay at the new Hyatt in Moscow: "Even the girl who swept the lobby was wearing high heels. I don't expect my staff to wear high heels." He added, "I want them to be comfortable and feel good."

When he was at the Ritz Carlton, Bowling sent his front desk girls for lessons from a makeup artist: "You can spend millions on your hotel and have a girl whose hair is down to here or a guy who's wearing an earring." Men at the Montage will wear double-breasted suits because, he says, they always leave the jacket on a single-breasted suit open.

Bowling doesn't like what he calls terminally chic boutique hotels where style trumps service, preferring for his own travels small classics such as Dukes in London or the Lowell in New York, though he admits he still gets a thrill at the Paris Ritz. He was startled to be told that during last winter's slow season, the Ritz offered guests free mink sleeping masks. "I can't imagine anything worse," he said, appalled. "It would be like having a cat sitting on your face."

A hotelier has to be very careful with special offers, he adds. "At a quieter time of year upgrade them to a suite or give them a bottle of champagne. Image is everything in a hotel. You can spend years building up a brand and destroy it in a week."

Born in Leeds, where he never dared enter the town's leading hotel, Bowling had to go to work early when his father died. He worked for three years in small hotels in Switzerland, attending hotel school afternoons. Someone in Lucerne told him to try for an job at the Dorchester, but that sounded a bit fancy so he applied to a small hotel in a funny little backwater in Mayfair called the Connaught, and found himself, trembling, in a tailcoat behind the front desk.

The manager was the formidable Bill Gustave, whose first command was that Bowling shed his Yorkshire accent, which was by then further decorated by a Swiss-German lilt.

"For my first three years at the Connaught I cried myself to sleep every night but it was worth it," he recalls. These were the glory days at the Connaught when people stayed for the season, huge wardrobe trunks lined the corridors and guests included Ingrid Bergman, both Hepburns and David Niven, who became a close friend.

"A lot of them were very important in the United States, I didn't know them until they turned up at the Carlyle - people like Bill Blass, Jerry Zipkin, John Fairchild - who introduced me to more people there."

When Bill Gustave died suddenly of a heart attack, Bowling, then a 30-year-old assistant manager, was too young to become general manager and a Connaught client invited him to run the Mayfair in New York, home of the soon-famous restaurant, Le Cirque. In 1978 Bowling was offered the Carlyle - "I ran all the way up Madison Avenue" - where he stayed until 1991, with five years off to open the Ritz Carlton, where he met Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

In Los Angeles, Nancy Reagan remains a favorite partner at lunch where they share one Cobb salad, a bottle of Evian and a single chocolate chip cookie. It was at the Bel Air that Bowling further honed his natural affability and discretion, with none of what he calls the in-your-face intrusiveness that some managers favor.

He likes things to be low-keyed. "I am very much against hotel rooms that are over-tarted, too grand. When you walk into a hotel room you should feel like home. Except better, of course."

The worst hotel experience is the one that reflects the truth: that your room, and your bed, have been occupied by hundreds of others. The really good hotelier effaces the transience that is the essence of every hotel.

The best sort of hotel experience was perhaps summed up by Prince Charles, a former Carlyle guest, when he came to the Bel Air. "You know, Frank," he said, "it's not like staying in a hotel, is it? It's like staying in a rich friend's house."