Sandals Emerald Bay, which opened last month, is the group’s first all-butler-suite resort. TTG’s Philippa Jacks joined staff for a day to see how the concept works

It’s an hour before the main flight of the day touches down on Great Exuma in the Bahamas, and behind the scenes at Sandals Emerald Bay there is a state of organised chaos in butler HQ. 

The phone rings constantly with current guests requesting room service or restaurant reservations and – just to put the pressure on – there’s an electronic ticker-tape on the wall which flashes up the number of staff available to handle enquiries and the current resolution time.

A huge whiteboard lists the new arrivals’ names, room number, and departure date, and there’s a bewildering filing system for print-outs of guests’ pre-selected “preferences”. 

As I join the butlers in dashing to and fro, delivering special sodas to one room and a cake iced with Happy Anniversary to another, I can’t see how we’ll possibly be ready for the influx of arrivals. But somehow, by the time the first guests roll up outside the hotel, I’m standing in the lobby with a tray of cold towels in hand, smile on face, and am a picture of butlerlike composure.

Attitude counts
Inside, I’m feeling rather out of my depth, so I’m pleased to hear from Robert Watson, founder of the Guild of Professional English Butlers, that the most important quality of a butler is not experience but attitude.

Some of the very first butlers Watson selected came from Sandals’ security department and elsewhere, with no hospitality experience.

“We had one girl from the laundry who had never even seen a guest before. But that didn’t matter – it’s the positive attitude and pleasant, open personality that I look for. That’s not something I can teach,” he explains.

The standards Watson demands of members of his guild are sky-high – it might be three years before he deems a butler good enough.
It doesn’t look like I’ll be going home with a guild badge after just one day then, but back in the lobby I take my chances with a trayful of champagne and successfully dole the glasses out to new arrivals without a single breakage.

Having already enjoyed three days of Sandals’ champagne on tap, it’s difficult not to start necking the champers myself but even with my limited butlering experience, I imagine being drunk in charge of a silver platter would be frowned upon. 

Next I accompany Tennesha who is planning to surprise some of her guests with a nice hot bubble-bath upon their return from a long day on an excursion. As I strew petals artfully around the bathtub, I ask Tennesha to tell me more about a butler’s duties (I think I’m distracting her because she drops her box of matches in the bath).

There is a list on the Sandals website of the kind of things you can expect from your butler: unpacking your luggage, keeping your wardrobe tidy, bringing room service, conducting check-in in your room. “But that’s just the beginning, and it’s different for every guest,” Tennesha explains. (I am definitely distracting her: now she drops her mobile phone in the bath and we have to try to dry it out with a hairdryer.)

Extra touches
Tennesha and Watson are both full of inspiring tales of Sandals butlers going the extra mile for their guests. At one resort, a male guest grumbled lightheartedly that his wife stayed in bed up on the mezzanine level every morning and made him go down to open the door to let the butler in with their breakfast. The next morning, the butler got a ladder and secretly set up breakfast outside on the mezzanine balcony so the couple could enjoy their breakfast upstairs.

In another tear-jerking example of butler ingenuity, a husband had requested a candlelit dinner for he and his wife on the beach but it was pouring down with rain; the butler brought bucketfuls of sand from the beach into the guests’ room and set up dinner there instead.

I haven’t been one half of a “couple in love” for a long time so am somewhat immune to such romanticism – it’s a sentimentality that would put the Brady Bunch to shame – but the guests loved it.

Watson has trained butlers at some of the world’s best hotels, including The Burj Al-Arab, but he says Sandals butlers stand out because of their sense of fun, and ability to touch guests’ emotions.

“I’ve been working with Raffles Singapore for eight or nine years and the butlers are very professional, but there’s a distance between the butler and the guest,” he tells me. “At Sandals there’s not that distance.”

Butler’s dream
The all-inclusive environment is a butler’s dream, he adds. “I didn’t realise it before, but the all-inclusive is the perfect vehicle for butler service. In a normal hotel, you’d have to wait until the guest ordered another drink before you could top up their wine. But at Sandals it’s like working in a private house – it’s all included.”

I hope the unfortunate couple in this suite will see the fun side of my towel origami. Tennesha’s showing me how to magically fold, roll and tuck a bath towel into the shape of a puppy but I’m making a dog’s dinner of it. Just then her mobile phone rings (not the one we dropped in the bath – that’s still waterlogged). One of her guests is up on the golf course and has forgotten something.

I let her hurry off to the golf course and return to my room. I collapse exhausted on the bed, crushing a pair of towel origami swans, and with a newly-gained appreciation of how my own cheery butlers have helped me out over the last few days. In the vast majority of murder mysteries, it’s normally the butler who “did” the crime but from what I can see, you can sleep safely at Sandals. These guys work so hard I doubt they’d find the time.

Fact box: Sandals and its butlers
History:
The Sandals Butler Service was launched in 2004 after Gordon “Butch” Stewart was so impressed by the service he experienced on a cruise that he wanted to replicate it at his resorts. Three weeks later, he’d flown Robert Watson, founder of the Guild of Professional English Butlers, out to the Bahamas to set to work on 90 potential candidates. 
In numbers: There are butler suites at 13 of the 14 Sandals resorts but it’s proved so popular that Sandals Emerald Bay is entirely butler-service. It was also announced this week that Royal Plantation Ocho Rios, part of Sandals, is to become all-butler service. Emerald Bay will eventually have 37 butlers – many of whom will be Bahamians trained from scratch.
Training: What sets a butler apart from other members of hotel staff is their varied experience: a Sandals butler-in-training spends two days in every department of the hotel, from the restaurant to the watersports centre and security desk. After initial training, it might take up to two years of further training to become a really excellent butler.
Contracts: Watson set up the Guild of Professional English Butlers 15 years ago. He is frustratingly discrete about the private houses in which he has worked (though I’ve heard rumours of Michael Jackson). Since Paul Burrell’s infamous dirt-dishing on Princess Diana, butlers might have to sign contracts 30 pages long, according to Watson.