The hotel that inspired Fawlty Towers has changed look and management.
The character of Basil Fawlty was inspired by a former manager at the hotel; he gave John Cleese and the Monty Python team a frosty welcome when they booked in 1971. The ferocious host berated them for not holding their knives and forks correctly and threw one of their briefcases over a wall believing it could be a time bomb.
I had a few encounters with people working in the service industry that made you feel small.
My most recent experience was in a hotel in Munich whose owner always demanded to check in our bags to ensure that we did not take any food in the rooms. We also stayed in a hotel in Rome where the guy at the reception was always moaning loudly when he had to hand us the room keys. His attitude seemed to be: you wanted a room now stay in it, what's this business of coming and going a couple of times a day?
