Derek Picot

Derek Picot is an international hotelier who has managed luxury hotels on five continents. He describes his career as a game of snakes and ladders without the ladders. This, he says, is why he had to find work in so many places on the globe.

From the Savoy in London to the Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong he has witnessed his guests engage in homicide, suicide, ecocide, regicide, pesticide and general over-indulgence. There have been world shaking events that have unfolded in those great establishments which he has managed. What about the day they blew the whole hotel up in Kuwait? Or when, on one of those Royal Tours, he sent the Queen to the top floor of the hotel in a lift all on her own. Or when they inadvertently served bacon in the Caesar salad at a Bah mitzvah in London? And was it Picot that after news of the coup arrived had rung the Royal suite to wake the President of the Seychelles to say he was no longer the President?

All these stories were ripe for a fine tome of hospitality misfortune and were the inspiration for his first book ' Hotel Reservations' also available on Amazon.

He has now published his second book, 'The Hotel Detective and his Lover' which is fictional story of a man seeking love and is based around more real events that happened in his career.

Picot is a regular contributor to an international travel magazine and consults on hospitality. He is a Master Innholder and Freeman of the City of London. He lives in Wimbledon and the South of France.