Tales from hotel car valets: knickers in a Ferrari and other secrets

Valet parking is one of the seamless five-star hotel services about which wealthy guests rarely think. You just hand the keys to your million-pound supercar to the liveried valet and saunter through the revolving doors to get on with visiting the spa or checking out the cigar lounge. Meanwhile, someone is spiriting your luxury vehicle to a nearby parking garage — hopefully with confidence and expertise.

As a luxury journalist I am occasionally handed the keys to cars that are sometimes worth hundreds of thousands if not millions of pounds. I’ve often embarrassed myself by failing to find a way to get into, start, put in gear, or even close the doors of a variety of six-figure-plus cars — never mind manoeuvre them. So I wondered how valets acquired such knowledge and skills, and if things ever went wrong.

I begin my investigations by approaching a valet loitering outside a five-star London hotel. He refuses to talk to me. It seems that discretion is another of the skills required for this job.

But a small tip, a note and my phone number given to another valet I’d seen at the same hotel yields a call back a few days later. Late-twenties, accentless, handling guests and cars with that fluid, unhesitant movement that comes with self-assurance, he could be any Gen Yer working in the capital.

Do things ever go wrong? Yes, but if they do they are usually quietly dealt with, he explains.

His favourite stories? The thankfully rare occasions when guests who have been rude to car-parking valets have unwittingly found themselves on the receiving end of discreet or delayed revenge. And then there’s the knickers-in-a-Ferrari story. More on both revenge and knickers later …

A car paparazzo who prowls London collecting photos and video clips of expensive cars — making money, he says, from views on social media and commissions — tells me the hotels that attract guests with the highest-calibre hypercars are the Peninsula, the Berkeley, the Connaught, the Rosewood and Grosvenor House.

The Peninsula, owned by the car enthusiast Sir Michael Kadoorie, is proud of its guest car care. Cars are carefully inspected before and after handover, the owner’s settings are never adjusted, and vehicles are always returned with bottles of chilled water.

The car valet team members must have held a driving licence for a minimum of ten years and have experience across a wide range of vehicles. They’re given vintage and performance-car handling training, and familiarise themselves, geek-like, with high-end car controls, features and quirks.

But the Peninsula has also made risk-avoidance part of the hotel’s garage design. Typical car park ramps are comparatively steep, meaning there is a risk of expensive front-spoiler or skirt damage to low-slung supercars. But the Peninsula’s garage ramps have extra-shallow gradients, and cars including a Lamborghini Aventador, a Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG and a multimillion-pound Ferrari LaFerrari were driven up and down the ramps by way of a scrape test.

Meanwhile, at the Dorchester on Park Lane, Paul Whittle, 63, the head concierge, runs a door and car valet team with a combined 100 years of blemish-free, big-ticket car-parking experience.

The Dorchester’s staff also inspect cars before moving them, although the most valuable ones, including a regular guest’s £3 million Ferrari, are parked outside the front door under continuous supervision, rather than risking parking garage dings.

“Driver training is handed down doorman to doorman, and in fact our entire door team, including the night porter, will take guests’ cars to the parking garage,” Whittle says.

“Those can be Ferraris, Bentleys, Rolls-Royces, but we ensure the process is quick: receive keys, inspect car for damage, top hat off, and off to the garage.

“Our valets are car enthusiasts and often swot up on controls [and deal with security] such as “ghost” systems requiring the input of a code to start the car.

“Some people may be nervous getting in a £1 million car, but our valets are naturals and confident. We’ve never had an incident.”

But things don’t always go smoothly elsewhere. One London parking valet tells how a colleague in a hotel in Italy discovered the hard way that even at full lock a £1.3 million Porsche Carrera GT couldn’t get up a spiral car park ramp — and bashed a super-pricey wing. He confessed and the hotel’s insurers paid.

Then there was the knickers-in-a-Ferrari scrape… Squeezing the supercar into the last remaining garage space, one valet looked down to select reverse and saw a pair of sky-blue knickers stuffed down the side of the seat. Briefly taken aback, not noticing the car was crawling backwards, he lightly scraped the rear wing on a pillar.

Praying the owner wouldn’t want the car that evening, the valet kept his cool and called a friend who worked in a vehicle body shop, who then sneaked into the garage to fix the scrape with an automotive scratch-repair kit and polishing gear; the parking space’s end-of-row location fortunately put it out of the range of the CCTV.

When the on-edge valet arrived for his shift the following day, the car was gone — and nothing was mentioned.

But hotel car-parking and door staff are not immune to the occasional rudeness or pompous sense of self-entitlement of some guests. Our whistleblower tells of one valet who delighted in dreaming up and deploying discreet retribution upon guests who were unnecessarily rude. His favourite was secreting a piece of fish inside a car or in an air vent, with the inevitable consequences over time. He’d also slip a small pebble behind a wheel trim or a hubcap, which would cause an annoying rhythmic rattle as the car was driven along.

Another strategy was to put moths under the seat of a supercar, which would then try to fly towards lights at night, setting off movement-sensitive car alarms, then return to their hidey-holes come daylight.

But rest easy, five-star hotel head concierges of London. These valets don’t work for you.

Iain Macauley