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Chapter 2
Madison – 11 months previously
I don’t often visit the offices of my clients. Most of my work is done remotely either by email or phone, so the summons to the Voyages Luxes office I received a week ago is unusual. As I have no idea what the meeting is about, I wasn’t sure how to dress. In the end I went for a professional look, with a dark, knee-length skirt with matching jacket, a white, wide collared shirt, black court shoes and muted lipstick. Better to be overdressed than underdressed, I reckon.
I announce myself to the receptionist and take a seat in the waiting area. It’s quiet today, just me and another man. I nod a hello to him as I take a seat, and he nods back. I guess him to be around the same age as me, possibly slightly older. He’s dressed in a pink floral shirt and dark blue turned-up jeans with highly polished brown brogues. Everything about him looks fastidious, from his beautifully ironed clothes to his perfectly manicured close-cut light brown hair. For some reason, my gaydar goes into high alert. I don’t know what it is about him, but he’s definitely giving off a gay vibe. Not flamboyant or effeminate, but the sort of guy who lives quietly with his boyfriend or husband, to whom he’s absolutely devoted. His skin looks soft, like he moisturises it, and he’s clean-shaven without even a hint of stubble.
I divert my attention from him and glance around the lobby. As befits a company like Voyages Luxes it’s grand, with a high ceiling, marble floors and expensive looking chandeliers. The chandeliers have always bothered me; they’re immaculately clean, but are high enough that they’d be difficult to reach, even with a stepladder. I can’t help wondering how they dust them, or stop spiders building elaborate cobwebs across them. At the back of the lobby are the security gates leading into the actual offices. I’ve never been any further than the lobby and the visitor meeting rooms, so I’ve never seen the workspace. I imagine it’s much less grandiose though – probably the usual arrangement of cluttered desks, computer monitors covered in post-it notes, and whiteboards with the hieroglyphic remains of badly rubbed out brainstorming sessions that seem to adorn most offices.
“Madison!” My reverie is interrupted by Mark Stevens, the commissioning editor of Voyages Luxes, striding across the hallway towards me. Under one arm he’s clutching a laptop and notepad, and the other is already outstretched. I get up to greet him.
“So good of you to come in, particularly at such short notice,” he says as he reaches us and shakes both our hands. “Toby, good to see you too. Robyn asked me to apologise to you – she’s running a little late. Do you two know each other, by the way?”
The man called Toby is also on his feet, and I can’t help noticing that he’s a good couple of inches shorter than me. I know I’m quite tall for a woman, at five feet nine inches, but he is most kindly described as ‘compact’.
Our blank looks must give us away. “Madison is one of our freelance writers – you might know her by her pen name, Lucy Swann – and Toby is an extremely talented photographer that we use when we can afford him,” Mark continues, with a wink.
“Are you Toby Roberts? Oh, my goodness, I love your work!” I exclaim, and he smiles. Mark isn’t bluffing when he says Toby is talented. Whether it’s bikini-clad models in beach settings or romantic sunsets, his images are a big reason that the magazine looks so beautiful. When I’m snapping away on my iPhone, trying to capture the essence of a place, I often find myself thinking “how would Toby Roberts frame this?” It never helps, of course. I think either you have an eye for composition, or you don’t. My pictures, while serviceable, fall firmly into the second category.
“Nice to meet you, Madison,” he replies, offering his hand. I was right, his skin is soft, but his handshake is warm and surprisingly firm. “I always enjoy reading your articles when I can. Your descriptions are so vivid I can often picture the scene without needing to look at the pictures.”
“That’s probably for the best,” I laugh. “My pictures are atrocious. There’s a reason why you get double-page spreads and mine are never printed bigger than passport size.”
“Much as I hate to interrupt your little love-in, can I persuade you to join me in the meeting room over there, Madison?” Mark interjects, and points towards one of the meeting rooms reserved for visitors on the other side of the lobby. The walls are clear glass with open Venetian blinds, and I can see tea, coffee and pastries have already been laid out, as they always are for visitors.
“Sure, sorry. It was nice to meet you, Toby,” I say.
“You too. I hope our paths cross again,” he replies.
Once inside the meeting room, I help myself to refreshments while Mark plugs his laptop into the projector and closes the blinds. I take a seat and turn it so I can see the screen, and then get my notepad out of my bag.
“Madison,” Mark says, as I’m taking a sip of coffee, and I notice that his voice is suddenly much more downbeat now that we’re in private. A niggle of worry forms in my stomach. “The reason I’ve asked you to come in is that we have a bit of a problem.”
As he speaks, he clicks a button on his laptop, and a hotel review appears on the screen. I recognise it as one of mine. My heart sinks. Did I get something wrong? Describe the wrong hotel? I always worry, particularly if I’m staying in several hotels over the course of a trip, that I’ll muddle them up, but I have a system for preventing that and it’s always worked so far. I always make sure that the first photo I take of any hotel or attraction shows the name. I then know that any photos between that one and the next one with a name in it are of that particular place, and this serves as my aide-memoir.
“Do you remember the Bellavista Hotel in Corfu?” Mark asks. “You reviewed it about a year ago.”
I stare at the picture on screen, frantically trying to remember the hotel. Sometimes I struggle to remember a place I stayed in the previous week, so trying to remember one from a year ago is a tall order. Although I always do my own research before I go, each hotel generally expects journalists to attend a famil, or familiarisation session, either on arrival or soon afterwards. This is essentially a meeting where the hotel owners, the local tourist board and owners of local attractions present the area to you and the things they particularly want you to try. They would say that it’s helping to get you up to speed so you can write about the place as if you were a local, but of course they carefully curate what they tell you to try to make sure you only see the good in a place. They’re useful, but you also have to try to see around them to an extent, and remember which famil went with which location. If you’re not very careful it can all merge into a blur very easily. I always make sure I take copious notes.
Mark gives me space to collect my thoughts. He knows what it’s like, he started out as a travel writer himself before climbing the editorial ranks. I read the opening text of the review, and a few memories start to surface.
“Vaguely,” I say eventually. “I think it was a four-star all-inclusive boutique hotel, wasn’t it? On the cusp of opening, adults only. Is that right?”
“That’s the one. Tell me about the trip.”
“Fairly standard, from what I can remember,” I say, after wracking my brains some more. “Usual famil when we got there, nice big rooms with balconies, fairly standard all-inclusive buffet, limited bar selection. Was that what I wrote?”
“And the nice big room you wrote about,” Mark continues, “was that a standard room or one of the more expensive ones?”
“I really can’t remember,” I tell him, honestly. “But we normally get one of the more expensive rooms, because the hotel is trying to show itself at its best, so I imagine that was the case here as well. Why?”
“Well,” he replies, after a short pause. “You must have liked it, because you strongly recommended it as a great place to stay on the island. The problem is that TripAdvisor appears to disagree with you.”
He clicks the button again and the TripAdvisor page for the hotel comes up on the screen. He scrolls through some of the reviews, giving me time to read them. Although there are a few five-star reviews, the review count against the posters is usually 1 and the English is poor, which indicates that they’re probably posted by the hotel itself. The majority of the others are not good, and some themes quickly start to develop. The food and drink come in for particular criticism, as do the lack of sunbeds, the rudeness of the staff, and the poky rooms with tiny bathrooms. I’m horrified.
“I don’t understand,” I say, after we’ve read and digested a few pages of reviews. “It sounds like a totally different hotel to the one I stayed in!”
“You can see the problem though, can’t you?” Mark asks. “It undermines our credibility as a luxury travel magazine if we strongly recommend a place that subsequently turns out to be awful. It’s also not good for your image, because it dents trust in you as an impartial reviewer.”
