Xavier Lablaude is a dab hand at looking after tourists. As GM of Belmond Mount Nelson Hotel Cape Town, the Normandy-born Frenchman knows exactly what tourists want — especially during the June-August high peak of safari season when they tend to follow Big Five game-spotting with three to four nights of R-and-R before flying home.
Guests are typically driven to the hotel early evening, exhausted. They sleep late the following morning, so Lablaude keeps his copious breakfast buffet running until 11 a.m. Camp sites have laundry facilities and Wi-Fi, according to Lablaude, whose office liaises closely with the Belmond-owned Journeys In Africa tour company, handling logistics for the majority of his safari tourists.
Overall, occupancy at his 198-room hotel should be 55% throughout 2015, up only two percentage points from the 2014 figure because of a collapse in forward bookings during October-November 2014 (at the height of the ebola scare, even though the countries affected are more than 2,500 miles away).
Fully, 25% of his business is entertainment and production, which took 2,000 room nights this March. Sean Penn stayed for three months while he directed “The Last Face” starring Javier Bardem and Charlize Theron. A French movie has booked 1,500 nights between July and November.
Back to tourism
“Out of safari season, we need to work on other offerings,” said Lablaude, who traveled extensively as a child with his oil-executive father. “The 1899 vintage all-pink Nellie, as she is affectionately called, attracts nostalgia lovers. Keycard holders and private-dining menus show watercolor views of the gardens by Patricia Fraser. We need two sittings for afternoon tea, which is accompanied by a mature pianist.”
Retro menu items in Planet restaurant include prawn cocktail and crêpes Suzette, and in May the hotel will launch an exclusive dinner theater with a bespoke three-act play, “The Summer of 1946,” by Alexander McCall Smith, showcasing characters supposedly returning to the hotel after World War II.
Lablaude is also custodian of 7 acres (2.83 hectares) of hotel gardens, which hold changing exhibitions of modern South African sculpture, currently including the Whistling Tourist by Frank van Reenen.