By Stephan Post, Launch General Manager Palacio Nazarenas
Only a few days to go now! Things are gathering pace, and yes, the hotel really is happening. This was brought home to me a couple of weeks ago when a team came over from our Orient-Express head office in London to do our pre-launch photo shoot. You can see a selection of their images on our new website.
Two Adrians (Adrian Houston, Photographer, and Adrian Hulf, Creative Director) led the charge. They were joined by our Peru team. Carlos Gonzalez, who runs our Orient-Express Peru tours, deserves a special mention. He soon proved that escorting our guests requires similar skills to organising a shoot—an absolute determination to overcome hurdles and pull everything together.
Photographer Adrian Houston (far left) and his team.
The hotel was a hard hat site, so our first challenge was to arrange permission for our models to lounge by the pool without blue helmets on their heads. The builders were still tiling the pool while the team were setting up tracks for the movie camera. But they finished just in time, the water went in—and just visit the website to see the result. This was the moment that I realised that everything is falling into place—and how wonderful the pool area will be when guests arrive and bring it to life.
All photo shoots seem to take forever, but this one took even longer! Whenever someone asked for a couple of glasses to go on a table, we couldn’t just go to the restaurant and fetch them. We had to find them in the store, dig them out of packing cases and polish them up. I can hardly believe it is only a few days now before they are all actually in use.
But do visit our website and as you’ll see from our photographs, we’re nearly there. And come 15 June, we will be. Perhaps you’ll be with us too?