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Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Ruffled Feathers - The Peabody Hotel

While in Memphis, we stayed at The Peabody. It's one of those places, if  you're into hitting hotel hotspots (I am..), like The Waldorf in New York City, where you kind of just want to say you've stayed at least once.  Except at The Waldorf, guests are made to feel very special. At The Peabody, howevs, guests are made to feel like...duck hunters - always out of season.


Even if you haven't stayed at The Peabody, you likely know its famed ducks are a big deal. They live atop the hotel in their own penthouse.


Their likeness is on everything - pillows, towels...even carved into soap.


And there's the parade. Every day at 11am and 5pm these ducks take a trip from their pie-in-the-sky apartment, roll down an elevator, and prance up a red carpet into a tiny fountain.


And people lose their minds. I'm not being cyncial because it's not that the ducks aren't sweet - they very much are. But the hotel staff goes super Secret Service on the throngs of quackarattzi just hoping for a quick picture,  making the entire experience somewhere between a joke and a nightmare. It was just a tad...reduckulous. Heeeee.

"Quacka, quacka, quackarattzi"

I am not kidding when I say we were relocated three times, forced to sit in a chair - DO NOT STAND or sit on the floor - and then when the ducks debuted and a woman beside us leaned up for a photograph, a hotel worker pounced on her from behind. She was, to say the least, startled and yelled a profanity. It didn't rhyme with duck, but it was in that family....

To put in midly, the parade experience coupled with some really subpar service left my feathers...well, just a little ruffled.

3 comments:

Leigh Powell Hines said...

That's hysterical about the ducks. Did the hotel seem out of date with the rooms? I don't like to stay in a lot of older hotels unless it's Preferred Hotel. They seem to do a good job with the older properties while keeping the character. I stayed at the Fairmont in Victoria. I should have not done so. I wasn't happy there, and was so mad that I didn't listen to Trip advisor. I think the Madison hotel in Memphis is gaining ground there. I can't believe that about the ducks.

Dee Stephens said...

I've never stayed there but did you know that they have a Peabody in Little Rock now that does the same thing.
Fun Trivia about the one in Memphis -- that's where they filmed that party scene in the film - The Firm.
Remember? They were on the rooftop.

Amy @ Forever 29 said...

Memphis and The Peabody are on my list of places I want to visit...would love to take my boys to see the ducks in a few years. I wonder when the "off season" is because I'd rather do without all that madness!

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