My Interesting Job: Luxury Hotel PR Guru Paula Fitzherbert

PR at that point was being a publicist. The Savoy’s press office was this extraordinary room with black-and-white signed photographs of the likes of Elizabeth Taylor. When we sold The Savoy and became The Maybourne Hotel Group, I went to work at The Berkeley. It was a really special place, but not that many people knew it, so it was my job to really put it on the map. The Savoy and Claridge’s were always the big hotels, so I had to work really hard to make people remember The Berkeley. It was a bit corporate at the time, but I was given the freedom to do things like launching ‘girls night in’ weekends and creating Prêt-à-Portea, which I dreamt up with my young daughter at our kitchen table, which in turn made everything feel a little more feminine and brought in a slightly different clientele. We launched the tea 15 years ago and it’s still going strong – it creates a turnover of £1m a year. And suddenly PR became something that was much more than a little bit of frippery: it became part of the business model of the hotel. That’s something I worked really hard to do. Ultimately, PR is all about driving business and that's why it remains a very important part of the company now.

When I first started in hotels, the most important things you were talking about was the thread count of the sheets or how big your plasma TVs were. Now it's about which fashion designers or artists you’re working with. You have to have your finger on the pulse of everything across culture and that’s the exciting bit. Hotels have become more of a lifestyle rather than just a place to park your head.

There’s not a day that I don't walk into the hotels and my heart misses a beat. But I’m also super mindful that it's my job to be like a swan and to make everything look so effortless as I’m doing things like sending over champagne to guests. Underneath I’m peddling furiously to keen all the balls juggling. As a PR, you touch every area of the hotels. A lot of it is your connections and the community – we work very hard to know our London tribe and we talk a lot about our ‘families of hotels’. It’s also quite an unusual thing we have here, because we have three – soon to be four – hotels in London, and we’ve worked very hard to position the hotels slightly differently, so whenever I have the pleasure of meeting anybody with great ideas, I can immediately see which hotel will fit best. But I like to keep the perception that this job is all glamour – it needs to look like it's fun, because you want people to be hanging out in your hotels.

I like to think of our hotels as three sisters. We say The Berkeley is the naughtier, more roué sister. It’s the younger one without the heavy hand of history on it, so you're sometimes able to get away with things a little bit more than with the others. We like to be a little more irreverent with it. The Connaught is the slightly more sensible sister because it’s got that heritage. It’s the queen of Mayfair. We talk about ‘the art of fine living’ at The Connaught because it’s got the best cocktail bar in the world and the best restaurant in the world – Hélène Darroze has three Michelin stars – so it's the best of the best. Then around the corner is Claridge’s, which is the grande dame. We talk about it being the mothership, as it’s probably the one with the loudest voice on the world stage, because it's been home to everybody from royalty and politicians to superstars. 

We’ve now made two documentaries. We made a documentary during 2012 called Inside Claridge’s, which was the first of the genre of hotel documentaries and, after, we vowed we'd never do it again! But we actually got away with it, and it was rather beautiful and everyone seemed to love it. But then we entered a new period with the hotel where we were undergoing a major redevelopment and getting it ready for the next 200 years of its life. It was still looking really beautiful, but it was a bit creaky around the edges. Our guests who stay here all the time forgave us, but it was time for us to up our game a little. So we dug down five floors and went up three floors, but all the while we kept the hotel open, which again was a bit of a world first. The documentary was made over seven years, so it was quite an epic project to work on.

We closed our doors for the first time in Claridge’s history during Covid. Even in wartime, we never closed. But what we did do was take in doctors and nurses, as that was our way of helping out. Our kitchens cooked for 500 NHS staff every day, and the doctors and nurses would have their food left outside their bedrooms. We always said it wasn't really a hotel at that point, it became a refuge. We didn't have room service, but housekeeping would go in once a week to change the bedding – even then, they had to go in in full hazmat gear. It was really quite extraordinary when you think about it.

That was a challenging time, but then so was opening up again and having to wear face masks. It was very challenging for hotels when everything we’re about is being able to look people in the eye and smile and interact. It was a very different experience. But I was very proud of what we’d done up to that point. At The Berkeley, we would feed the 999 services every day. There was one day when everyone thought there was a major incident in Knightsbridge because there were so many ambulances and fire engines outside. But it was just because they were coming to eat the beef stroganoff the hotel had made for them. Post-pandemic, we kept up the 999 Club and once a month we serve coffee and pastries to the emergency services. That experience made us focus even more on the community. Sometimes people think hotels are all about tourists, but one thing we’re really proud of is feeling like we have a really big London fanbase of people who use our hotels every day.

We managed to do lots of amazing things during the pandemic – including shooting a Rolling Stones music video. That was such a career highlight for me, as I’m a huge fan. It had Normal People’s Paul Mescal in it – so my daughter was pleased too – and was a dream gig. But these things only work if they’re adding to the positioning of the hotels. We say no to nine out of ten things that come our way. That said, we’re adventurous with what we do when we can. We have to stay relevant. Having history is great, but you can't live in it.

Another career high was working during the London Olympics. We had so many heads of state, kings and queens and goodness knows who staying here. At the time, the ballroom wasn't being used, so we decided to go to Noma in Copenhagen, which was the world's number one restaurant, and suggested they did a pop-up in Claridge’s. So, René Redzepi – who’s a real rock'n'roll star and god of the chef world – arrived. We thought he might walk into the lobby and wonder what he was doing here, but he loved it and it became a wonderful juxtaposition of a cool Scandi restaurant, which served live ants as a first course, and classical Claridge’s. It sold out within two hours. It was an extraordinary experience having René and his team here with us. Every day before service, he used to put Metallica on full blast to motivate his staff and so all of Claridge’s staff were involved with that too – it was a really big cultural shift.

Every time I’ve thought about leaving, something else exciting happens at one of our hotels. And we're now at this point where I have a hand in making those changes. Having that responsibility and being able to do that is really special. My best friend used to work at Dior and one day we were both sitting in Claridge’s and we saw John Galliano, who was heading up Dior at the time, next to us. We thought, why don’t we get John to design our Christmas tree next year? He said yes. I had to go to our general manager and tell him, “This year, the Claridge’s tree will be a frozen tropical tree with snakes and leopards on it.” Thankfully, his response was “Fabulous”. It was a major installation and nowhere had done anything like that before. That was 12 years ago and, since then, we’ve had incredible trees designed by the likes of Karl Lagerfeld, Diane von Furstenberg and Christian Louboutin. And best of all, every single one of them has been one of our guests, so no money has exchanged hands. It’s a love relationship.

For 200 years we've had three hotels in London and now we're about to give birth to a fourth. The Emory is the last project from the late Sir Richard Rogers. Unlike our others, it will be a new build and it’s going to be the first all-suite hotel in London. We feel there's a market for it and we're going to do something really special – it will be a more contemporary way of creating the five-star luxury we have in the other hotels. There’s going to be an extraordinary health club, a members’ club and a swimming pool.