THOSE OLD-FASHIONED CHARMED WOO TODAY'S TRAVELLING ELITE
Concorde celebrated its tenth birthday this year. But for romantics, the real travel event of 1986 takes place next month -- the fiftieth anniversary of the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary. The biggest passenger liner in the world in 1936, the Queen Mary caused just as much excitement and banner-waving as Concorde did 40 years on.
What a sad 40 years it has been for the travel industry. Crossing the Atlantic has been reduced from a five-day expedition to a three-and-a-half hour hop. As speeds have increased, so style has slowly disappeared. In the 1920s and 1930s, international travel was glamorous, luxurious and above all, leisurely. Today, the purveyors of luxury travel can scarcely keep their businesses going.
There is no successor to Charles Ritz, ("Ritz simply means reasonable perfection," he once said). His palace, filled with antique furniture and paintings, where service was limited only by what you asked for, was imitated by countless other hoteliers.
Where could you find an eccentric architect like Addison Mizner nowadays? In 1926 he built The Cloister, a 100-room hotel in Boca Raton, Florida. A labyrinthine pink stucco construction, The Cloister has a dining room with a high-vaulted, cathedral-like ceiling supported on columns covered in 14-carat gold leaf.