It was a pleasant morning at Israel’s most expensive hotel. The air was already very hot, but not yet broiling. In the thick shadow of the restaurant’s patio, opposite the stunning view of the Arava desert and the mountains of Edom, you could chill out with a vegetable juice cocktail to reinforce the immune system, or with a cappuccino whose foam is adorned with the image of a camel, created with a special espresso jet printer.
Neil Jacobs, CEO of the Six Senses chain of resorts and spas, radiated satisfaction with the new location. Jacobs looks exactly as one would imagine a senior British tourism executive who lives in Singapore: short, graying, smiling, soft-spoken and exuding charm. We had a pleasant conversation about the chain’s values, which are topped by sustainability: how the hotel was built from locally quarried stones, how it blends perfectly into its surroundings and provides a livelihood for the immediate community.
Just as I was thinking that I couldn’t sustain any more sustainability, the unexpected noise of a small flood came into earshot. A quick leap over the small stone fence at the edge of the patio revealed a sight that was hard to digest: a powerful stream of clear brown liquid had burst from a pipe that emerged from the hotel and was streaming straight into the primeval wadi below. “It’s a backflush, we’re on it,” someone was heard saying in the background.
Not a muscle of Jacobs’ face twitched – he’s already seen a few things in his career as a hotelier. In a friendly tone, he said he didn’t know what was going on. “I’m going to have to leave…I have a PCR test [for COVID-19] in Tel Aviv in three-and-a-half hours…,” he added, explaining that later that night he would be heading to the new Six Senses property, in Ibiza, Spain.
Six Senses Shaharut, which opened three Fridays ago on the brow of a towering mountain in the southern Arava, is an exceptional institution in the Israeli landscape in multiple, diverse ways. Not only is it the most expensive and luxurious hotel in the country and the one with the most far-reaching sustainability aspirations, it is also the most remote and, above all, it is the first full-fledged resort in the country, if we don’t take into account Shmulik’s Resort in Had Nes, a small town on the Golan Heights, and a few other attempts.
A resort, as opposed to a plain old hotel, doesn’t offer only lodgings and is not grounded in an existing community, like Six Senses’ immediate competitor, the Beresheet Hotel in Mitzpe Ramon. A proper resort is a destination in itself: a forward outpost of pampering and sumptuousness in the heart of wild nature, which provides a holistic experience that is a harmonious blend of the material and the spiritual.
Six Senses Shaharut.
For Six Senses to be a true base for tours of the area, no fewer than eight camels have been recruited; they are accommodated in a lean-to below the hotel, along with a few electric mountain bikes, the last word in the industry. Awaiting the visitor in each room is an imperialistic straw hat and a cane of unfinished wood with a leather handle, both of which can of course be purchased at the end of your stay. These accessories are intended to enable you to venture forth and conquer the oriental wilderness on foot, so that later on you will be able to wash off the desert dust in the gilded bathtub in your room.
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The problem is that in the withering heat of August in the Arava, it’s really not possible to advance even one meter during most of the day, especially on the hotel’s trails, which are completely exposed to the scorching sun. The talented designers (Plesner Architects) apparently didn’t want to create too much shading, in order not to have anything rise above the original contour lines of the site and to stand out on the horizon. As a consequence, guests must be transported to every part of the 200-dunam (50-acre) compound to avoid being burned in the brutal heat. You want to get to the spa, the restaurant, the palm leaves weaving workshop or the Tibetan bowls journey (“a trip among healing sounds”)? Call for an electric Hummer. That type of dependence may be accepted in the resorts of the world, but during our visit it brought about a few unpleasant incidents.
After all, luxury hotel or not, international chain or not, in the end, the staff are Israelis and so are the guests. On top of which, the hotel had only opened the day before, with greater occupancy than expected and a staff insufficiently large and mostly inexperienced. In the first hours of our stay we waited for transportation more than an hour all together – not a little, considering that every minute was costing us more than 4 shekels (about $1.25). At one stage we decided that it was hopeless. We stopped calling the reception desk (which didn’t answer anyway) and started hitchhiking. The problem was that other guests continued to insist that they be picked up from their room as promised and within a reasonable time.
At the crowded checkout of Sunday midday, this collective expectation exploded in a quite extreme display of displeasure, considering the circumstances. The dismal vibe of a visit to a government ministry suddenly descended upon the hotel’s magnificent reception hall, with its huge raw-wood tables from Thailand, the stupefying Negev vistas through the windows and the delicate ambient music in the background. A guest in a black shirt, who the day before was calm at poolside, looked edgy. “I’m trying to cope here,” his wife said in despair. “I waited 45 minutes in the heat. Every second I get uptight calls from the reception desk for us to check out. So send transportation! There’s a breakdown here.”
A celeb chef in dotted shorts and a T-shirt who was a private guest arrived to check out, boiling, in every sense of the word. “We could have had sunstroke from the waiting,” he railed at the staff and begged them to let him be on his way. “I have to be up north at 6 o’clock,” he said. “I have a wedding, I have to marry people.” But it took time to settle the bill for the massages.
There were some other snafus, too. Our bags reached our room more than an hour after us; the next day the staff displayed hyper-efficiency by bringing the bags of the next guests into the room even before we’d left. Most embarrassing, though, was when a chambermaid opened our door without knocking and stuck in a head with a coronavirus mask covering only her chin (overall, the staff had a score of mediocre-minus in terms of wearing masks in closed spaces). Grimly, she asked, “Do you have a minibar?” We said we did and she shut the door and disappeared. Fortunately, we were both dressed, and not a couple that is quick to exploit every minute in the king-sized bed for intimate activity in the desert.
Six Senses Shaharut.
Daniel Tchetchik
“No good, no good. Yeah. Yeah,” Jacobs nodded empathetically when I told him about the latest incident, and shared with us that in his room the cold water hadn’t worked at first, a dire punishment under the circumstances. In August it’s far better if it’s the hot water that doesn’t flow.
Splendor in the sand
“It’s the first couple of days, so they haven’t got the quickness of service,” Caroline Kalms, a guest, remarked with British poise as she sat comfortably by the breakfast table opposite the landscape with her husband, Brian. They’re a charming couple of middle age. He is a bespectacled managerial consultant, she’s a teacher whose manner of speech is slow but charged with energy. They live in London, they have a vacation home in Herzliya Pituah and they came here to relax a little.
“We are city people,” Brian said. “When we ask for coffee we want a coffee, not coffee in half an hour.” On top of which, he added that the whole experience is “very expensive. It’s eye-wateringly expensive.” Even so, like a few other guests we spoke to, they were satisfied by and large, despite the price and the glitches.
In other hotels in Israel, “you ask for coffee, you get a shrug of the shoulders; here somebody at least tries, ” Brian noted. “I think that attitude is very important.”
They’re certain the hotel will be a success.
The Kalms.
“I know all our friends would 100 percent come here. One-hundred percent,” Caroline said. “More than Mitzpe. Mitzpe is old now,” she added, referring to Beresheet, which opened in 2011.
The pronounced operating difficulties were especially surprising given the glamorous setting in which they occurred. Six Senses Shaharut really is a spectacularly beautiful institution and its immense cost – about 200 million shekels (some $60 million) – is evident everywhere you look. Most of the hotel is hewn into the mountain, so the splendor of the desert that surrounds it is visible from every angle. There isn’t a millimeter of the place that isn’t designed and finished to the hilt. The showers by the pool are huge, marble-tiled spaces, inlaid, including the ceiling, with small mosaic pebbles. The children’s club looks like a hybrid between a Montessori kindergarten on steroids and a miniature version of the hotel itself. There are small hills made of light-colored wood containing cute sitting nooks covered in pink leather, huge camel dolls for riding and even a campfire corner with “logs” made of cloth. The enthusiasm wanes a bit when it turns out that, before depositing your kid, you have to waive in writing any potential claim against the hotel, even if your child dies there “accidentally for any reason.” But the place is lovely, and the children can play under parental supervision there, too.
The guest rooms, which are called “suites” or “villas,” are an astonishing blend of Pardes Hannah-style recycled wood and mud plaster, and the glowing finish of luxury hotels. The best illustration of this is the plaster that covers floor, walls and ceiling. At first glance it appears to be just earth plaster in a delicate marlstone shade, but when you touch it you feel the cold smoothness of marble.
Later I found out that it’s tadelakt, a prestigious Moroccan plaster that Romanian workers laid down by hand in eight layers until it became hard and smooth, like an eggshell. The result evokes an ecological B&B that underwent polishing, distillation and refinement. The proportions of the long, narrow room focus one’s gaze on the desert, which is visible in all its glory also from the iron-encased show window in the front.
There are no oil paintings here, no porcelain ashtrays, plastic pens or any other hotel cliches. Even the unavoidable Nespresso machine is hidden in a wooden closet built into the wall. The television was covered with a kind of carpet that descends from the ceiling with the pressing of a button; it’s only a pity that the accursed device turned itself on and catapulted guests out of bed at 6 A.M. That’s the doomsday scenario of every fancy hotel: an abrupt and cruel collective wake-up at the crack of dawn. Luckily, most of the people who told me about it did so with good humor. When you go back to sleep in thick, pure cotton bedding, despair apparently becomes more comfortable.
As I noted, we arrived at the hotel the day after the opening. The atmosphere was a bit chaotic, but also festive and emotional. In an institution like this you don’t just enter the reception area and proceed to one of the counters; this isn’t a youth hostel. The guests are welcomed with high ceremony at the entrance gate, which is at the bottom of the mountain brow, and they are driven to the front door. So the embarrassing moment of the official reception plays out below. Staff in desert-colored uniforms and Palladium boots stood there and declared to Daniel, the photographer, and me, in English, “Welcome to Six Senses Shaharut,” while placing the palm of their right hand on the left part of their chest and bowing slightly. As in the television series “The White Lotus,” they also offered us cold, damp towels to refresh ourselves and chatted with us in English about the hardships of the trip.
But that was an unusual scene. In contrast to the HBO series, the service employees at Shaharut are largely recently released soldiers, confident and happy, who aren’t overly servile or excessively polite. During our stay, we didn’t hear much use of the word “Sir,” and from my point of view, that was a relief.
“To the south of the Negev Desert… at the Arava Valley, is the small community of Shaharut, where traditional desert hospitality is expressed by generosity of spirit,” the hotel’s English-language website states. There is no generosity like generosity toward oneself, is what the person who did the pricing for August probably said to himself. We paid 5,165 shekels (about $1,595) for one night in a room ranked one above the lowest, including VAT, which was added to the final price. The cheapest rooms, which cost a little under 4,000 shekels, were, unfortunately, occupied.
Well, what’s one shekel more, one shekel less, I thought as I sipped cold water, with an herbal touch, from a gilded glass, while nibbling discreetly on a ma’amoul, a date-filled pastry ornamented with pistachios, and waiting for the transport to my room, which was late. The hotel’s sales manager, a Cypriot fellow by the name of Polis Ioannou, personally provided the valet parking, driving our car to the shaded guests’ area. Our next meeting with him would be a lot less pleasant, although at the time, we didn’t know that.
After a bit more small talk, the electric Hummer arrived to pick us up. On the way the driver gave us a short overview of the area, taking special note of the ecological aspects. “The whole hotel revolves around sustainability,” he said. “We try to reuse everything. Sustainability.”
How genuinely ecological and sustainable-oriented can a hotel which required two years of digging into an unfortunate desert mountain actually be? “That’s a big question,” says Eran Keter, who is an expert on tourism management and development from Kinneret Academic College and a serious nature lover: “The DNA of tourism is: spend a lot of money and have fun. Sustainability, by contrast, means doing things in a calculated, measured way. For example, to look at the vegetation in the hotel and to ask yourself what water they use to irrigate it, where the water comes from and at whose expense.”
The question of sustainability becomes more acute when we take into account the immense carbon footprint created by traveling in the world of tourism. “The clients of Six Senses won’t arrive by hitchhiking from Be’er Sheva,” Dr. Keter observes. “They’ll fly to Ramon Airport from their home in Paris or New York. [The hotel, which does not have kashrut supervision, was originally planned to host mainly foreign guests.] According to the data of the United Nations’ tourism organization, 40 percent of the emissions in this field originate in flying, 32 percent in driving and only 21 percent from the places of accommodation themselves.”
Six Senses Shaharut. There are no oil paintings, no porcelain ashtrays, plastic pens or any other hotel cliches. Even the unavoidable Nespresso machine is hidden in a closet and the television is cove
In other words, even if you establish a hotel with zero emissions, which irrigates its organic garden with drops of sweat it collects from the guests – you will still be stuck with the environmental damage caused by the sheer act of getting there, which is the principal damage. “Another possibility, of course, is not to build new hotels [in this area], but to offer people Airbnb apartments in Dimona,” Keter suggests. “There’s a train to the city, it’s 100-percent local economy, the amount siphoned off by international corporations will be minor, there will be no construction in open spaces and at most they’ll build another apartment on the roof of an existing project. Obviously that is the most sustainability-oriented product there could be.”
And the most depressing.
Keter: “That’s why it’s necessary, in the end, to find a prescription that the public can cope with.”
After all the qualifications, Keter welcomes the creation of Six Senses Shaharut. For one, he thinks that the construction based on rigorous environmental standards is the lesser of the evils, but also because it might induce other hotels in Israel to promote sustainability, which at the moment is quite lagging compared to the international scene, and because it will encourage more hotel initiatives in the area, and thus will disperse the tourism pressure in the country. Last month, Time magazine included the Negev in its list of the world’s 100 greatest places, in part because of the imminent opening of Six Senses Shaharut.
“I choose to see the positive side,” Keter says. “Let’s not be Luddites.”
I remain divided on the subject. After all, there was untouched nature here and someone dug into it, and did so quite forcefully. No matter how beautiful the result, that bit of nature is gone for good.
Crackers and olives
In the spirit of sustainability, we too tried to blend into our surroundings. It wasn’t easy. It was clear that the arrival in a small, dusty, old Toyota of two bearded guys who obviously lacked economic clout – one of whom wrote incessantly on his phone while the other took pictures nonstop with a huge camera – aroused a certain suspicion. We decided to speak English between us, in order to create the impression that I was a down-and-out architect who was interested in the hotel’s construction style, and he was my rich American cousin and an amateur photographer who invited me at his expense. We didn’t want to announce our arrival beforehand and be given special treatment.
We got through the reception process more or less successfully, as with the sustainability tour at 4 P.M. (“The camel is a big symbol for us”) and the pool lazing at 6 o’clock. Toward 7, the pool began to empty out, both because the sun was about to set and because wine was being distributed, on the house, in the small amphitheater next to reception area, on the occasion of the sunset. That was an opportunity for us to hobnob with the local guests, as they mingled sociably with top executives from the 31-facility world chain who had come to check the pulse. I told one of them, a sympatico Japanese fellow, about our difficulties so far, and his face turned ashen from shame and disappointment. “I’m sorry that that happened and you had to go through that,” he said. “Challenge is always good and it will make us stronger and better.”
The impression that formed quite quickly was that people with money had come here, but not only Israel’s aristocracy of capital. There was one young couple who decided to invest in a night to mark the young woman’s 25th birthday; there were a few high-techies for whom forking over 4,000-8,000 shekels for a night or two isn’t such a big deal; and there was an elderly but well-preserved couple of academics who had leaped at the opportunity to get a 20-percent discount via a coupon they purchased on the hotel’s website. Of course, there was also the Tel Aviv family who chose to arrive at the hotel in a private helicopter piloted by the father of the family, which landed and took off all the time with intolerable noise. But most of the guests arrived by car, and the parking lot didn’t contain only gilded Ferraris.
At this stage, Polis Ioannou, with his finely honed senses, started to smell something about us, and he didn’t find the smell pleasant. When, under the influence of the excellent wine that mingled with my blood, I started to lose my sense of caution and to cruise among the guests with paper and pen, the Cypriot hotel official made a beeline for me and asked me to accompany him to the side, whereupon he started to interrogate me in a severe tone. I identified myself as a journalist immediately, but that wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to know who sent me, what we wanted and why the hell we had come as just plain guests and hadn’t identified ourselves in advance and allowed him to pamper us, for which he has the wherewithal. The retort that restaurant reviewers also show up without prior coordination didn’t satisfy him.
We had dinner in our room. We gnawed on crackers and olives like terrorists hiding in a cave in Afghanistan, because it wasn’t pleasant for us to avail ourselves of the restaurant (where, by the way, the prices are less extreme than one would expect) and encounter the hurt and suspicious face of the sales manager from Cyprus.
In the end things were put right, more or less. We continued with our assignment, only with a slightly lower profile, and Ioannou, who had scowled at us the previous night, greeted us warmly the next morning at breakfast. “Now I realize that the best time to take photographs in this hotel will be January-February… now, as you see, it’s all very hazy. So, that’s not the right context,” he said, explaining why he wasn’t happy about journalists visiting at the moment. My personal opinion is that if you charge the full price you also need to be able to cope with criticism, but I wasn’t sure that telling him that would improve our relationship. I stayed mum. He added, “This is not going to be the last time we get to see each other, I hope.”
I don’t think we’ll be able to afford to come again.
Ioannou: “It’s costly, I wouldn’t say pricey. But it is costly.”
Are Six Senses hotels abroad also this expensive?
“Well, expensive in which manner?”
In the manner of $1,200 a night.
“It could be even higher at some destinations.”
A short comparison I did when I got home showed that he was right: A search for a random date (March 1, 2022) revealed that in terms of price per square meter, the simplest room in Six Senses Shaharut is only the third most expensive in the world in the chain. Above it are Bhutan and France, below it all the rest, from Seychelles to Oman. Everyone talks about the cost of living, no one talks about the cost of luxury hotels.
Arguably, there’s no point in talking about the price, because a vacation in a five-star resort isn’t actually compatible with the accepted definition of a basic commodity. But on the other hand, if it’s that expensive, it’s only reasonable to expect smooth, if not impeccable, hospitality. Because, when someone at the pool shouts at the courtesy vehicle rumbling by to keep its distance, and someone else says to him, “Quiet, what about peace of mind?” – you no longer know whether you’re in the infinity pool of the most expensive hotel in Israel, or in the cafeteria of the Kiryat Ata Ikea.
The British tip
“We’ll see to it that the guest’s experience is perfect. It will take time, and there will be screwups along the way. But there’s no need to despair,” says the hotel’s owner, Ronny Douek, a social entrepreneur and businessman. “Something momentous has been done here, and it deserves to be given its moments of grace.”
Douek is an affable person, and when he talks about the hotel the excitement in his voice is palpable. He’s been involved in this story for more than a decade, he invested vast amounts of money in it, and then at the moment of truth the coronavirus pandemic struck. After a two-year delay, the hotel was scheduled to open on Thursday, August 5, but at the last moment one of the drivers was confirmed COVID-positive. Four paramedics were flown by helicopter from Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv to Shaharut, the 208 members of the staff were tested twice, all came out negative, but that complication added a delay of one day for the launch.
The result was that Thursday’s guests were squeezed in with Friday’s, and the hotel, which was supposed to open with extremely limited occupancy for the trial run, was more fully occupied than had been planned. On the other hand, they hadn’t succeeded in recruiting enough personnel. So there was intense pressure on employees who were both few and new.
Why didn’t you offer introductory run-in prices?
Douek: “They [the management of the hotel chain] considered that, but they wanted to position the hotel at a certain price. It’s not something absolute. If they feel that they are not achieving precise service, they will take trial-run prices. The place has only been open a week [when our conversation took place], for heaven’s sake.”
Douek told the managers that from his point of view, now “he is not making money, but making friends.” At the moment that is not reflected in special reductions, but in all kinds of bonuses, like wine at sunset, yoga lessons, things like that.
“Look at the B&Bs in the Galilee – with all due respect, there’s nothing there and they cost 3,000-4,000 shekels a night,” Douek says. “You saw the investment here. We are not apologizing, we don’t want to be thanked for it, we’re not a nonprofit. But it will take 40 years to recoup the investment.”
When doubts are raised about the ecological aspect of the enterprise, Douek almost loses his cool. When he bought the land, he explains, it had already been zoned for a hotel long before, and a project far less environmentally friendly was going to be built there.
“The desert thrills me deeply,” he says. “There are huge, amazing spaces in the Negev. We took, all told, a hill of 200 dunams and we built a hotel at the level of international sustainability. What is the criticism about? About the establishment of a hotel in a place that was already officially zoned for tourism and recreation? We sleep very well at night.”
Douek insists that even though the chain offers guests the option of arriving by helicopter, it does not encourage this and doesn’t make any profit from it. What about the brown water that suddenly burst out, I asked him. He looked into it, didn’t get a precise answer, but insists that in any event it wasn’t sewage but drainage – in other words, it had to have been an unharmful liquid.
When the Kalms couple asked when we were leaving, I told them at 1:30, right after the palm leaves weaving workshop. “Why?” Mrs. Kalms asked, pausing on every syllable of a one-syllable English word. I don’t know, I said, but psychologically it seems to me that when you leave your room, it’s over. And then she revealed their great secret, perhaps the best tourism tip I’ve received in my life: not to get worked up about the check-in and checkout times. When these hotel pros go on vacation, they come in the morning to sit by the pool. To chill out. Swim a little. Get into the groove. And usually they get into their room earlier. On leaving day they do the same trick in reverse: After evacuating the room they go back to the pool, listen to music, splash around, doze off on an easy chair, possibly order something to eat or drink, shower in the pool’s shower and leave when the heat subsides, at dusk.
If I’d heard that from an Israeli couple, I might have been skeptical. But when it came from a British teacher you can rest assured that this genius method meets the most rigorous standards of courtesy. Later I discovered than even Douek thinks it’s terrific. We took Caroline’s advice, and in the afternoon, after the dust had settled in the reception area and our bags were already in the car, we all met at the pool.
“Life is for the living,” she said, and went back to reading her e-book as she leaned on the side of the pool, half in the water and half getting a tan, as the mountains of Edom were painted in twilight hues. If we’re already in the most expensive hotel in Israel, we’ll suck this night to the full, I said to myself. Besides, maximum exploitation of resources – that’s genuine sustainability.
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