Disturbing news from Torquay: Fawlty Towers has gone boutique. The town’s Gleneagles Hotel (01803 293637), whose breathtakingly rude service inspired the classic series, relaunches next Monday after a £1m refurbishment. “There’ll be no dead bodies on the stairs, and Germans are welcome,” they say. Nice to know some things don’t change, though: there’s still a Spanish waiter.
Stewardesses reverberated
Okay, they didn’t really — but did you know those are the longest words you type only with your left hand? Neither did a Virgin Atlantic passenger until he (or she) put it to the airline’s new Any Questions Answered service. For £1, you use your armrest handset to text a query — the dafter the better — which is answered in minutes by one of 500 researchers on the ground. But some passengers seem confused: the second most popular question is: “Has the plane landed yet?” That oblong thing on the wall is called a window...
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Wheels on fire
Cutting-edge thrill-seekers can now heli-bike... into a volcano. For £210, Helipro (00 64 6357 1348) will whisk you to the top of New Zealand’s Mount Tarawera for a scree slide into the crater itself, followed by a 10km spin down the sheer outer slopes.
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Hilton sex shock
Good old Hilton: reliable, steady... sorry, we nodded off for a moment there. But the chain is making a serious effort to sex itself up with the Hilton Tower Bridge, opening at the end of this month in Southwark. Designed by Jestico & Whiles (One Aldwych, The Hempel), it’s pretty standard from the outside, but the copper, clay and timber interior ticks all the right trendy boxes. Doubles start at £199; www.hilton.com.
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Holy water
Cleanliness is, our mums told us, next to godliness, but isn’t Mandarin Oriental (www.mandarinoriental.com) taking it a bit literally? Its new hotel in Prague, opening on Tuesday, features a spa located in a Renaissance chapel. What the original inhabitants would have made of the steamy couples’ treatment rooms, God only knows. Rooms start at £140, treatments at £22.