True story: In 2003, I applied to work at the Raffles Hotel Singapore as a recent high school graduate with no credentials beyond a love of luxury hotels. Somehow enthusiasm was enough to qualify me for a summer internship in the butler department at one of the world’s most venerated properties. I got the job and booked my flights. But before I could take off, SARS began to rage in Southeast Asia, putting an end to my plans. To this day, I wonder: If it hadn’t been for Covid’s cousin, would I have pursued a career on the other side of the table, working at hotels rather than writing about them?
Raffles is not only the grande dame of Asian hospitality and the international gold standard of luxury service, but it’s also a Singaporean national monument. It was founded in the 1880s by four Armenian-Iranian brothers—the Sarkies family—who made their money trading luxury goods and leveraged their connections to introduce fine wine and caviar to East Asia. Rudyard Kipling wrote The Jungle Book here. Joseph Conrad, Elizabeth Taylor and Ava Gardner were regulars; ditto Michael Jackson. Queen Elizabeth II stayed in 2006, one in a lengthy list of monarchs who’ve temporarily called Raffles home.
And then there’s the Long Bar. Just as renowned as the hotel itself, this peanut-shell-littered, wood-clad saloon is the birthplace of the Singapore sling.
The lovely colonial cornices and world-famous hospitality have changed little in Raffles’ 137 years. But all around it, Singapore has come into itself as a vibrant playground for the world’s wealthy, who descend upon the city-state with cash to splash. The Raffles team of 25 exhaustively trained butlers ensures their every need is met.
I’ve gone behind the scenes at the world’s most famous luxury establishments for Bloomberg Pursuits. I’ve been a ski instructor in Aspen, a maître d’ at Nobu, even a cast member at Walt Disney World—all in the name of discovering how far the staff at these elite institutions will go to make our wildest dreams come true. And now, exactly 20 years since my missed internship, I donned an ivory vest and crimson cravat to see what it takes to offer Raffles’ storied service.
Each butler serves a “pantry” of about 20 suites out of the hotel’s 115, in eight-hour shifts, acting as the conduit between the guests and Raffles’ many departments, including food and beverage and housekeeping. My primary job was to make sure the guests were always comfortable, to meet their demands quickly—perhaps before they even ask. Want an impossible-to-reserve Michelin meal with a day’s notice? Done. Forgot your Dopp kit and need a new flight of K-beauty cosmetics? It’s sorted. Tickets to the cricket match? No problem.
“Assigning a butler to more suites than that would be overwhelming,” head butler Jeremy Cheah tells me on my first day. “They wouldn’t have time to connect with their guests.” And connecting with guests is key—when butlers hand off their pantry roster to the next shift, they pass along an exhaustive list of quirks and preferences to ensure seamless service with a personal flair.
Here’s what I learned when I joined this elite relay.
The staff constantly data-mines the guests
Butlers notice everything. If you didn’t touch your chocolate bonbons, you may be a cheesecake kinda guy. If you mentioned offhand that you like wine but didn’t crack open the gifted bottle of merlot, we’ll bring sauvignon blanc tomorrow. If you’re a solo traveler, the team will note which side of the bed you slept on last night—and set up your turndown service accordingly the next evening.
This type of proactive care starts before you check in. Yes, we Google you, which can reveal something as simple as your passion for gardening (in which case you may find a book about Singapore’s native plants as a welcome gift) or being part of a sunrise run club (in which case we’ll have a banana and orange juice waiting for you when you get back at 6 a.m.).
Our understanding of our guests evolves with careful observation. We trade intel at a daily all-call meeting where we note everything from anniversaries to language preferences or dietary needs. Even benign-seeming details like left-handedness are flagged. Did you know that if a lefty isn’t seated at the left corner of a restaurant table, they’ll bump arms with their neighbors while dining?
And we keep talking about you all day, every day—especially during handoffs, when we share who’s got an extra-messy room that may need housekeeping reinforcements or who’s cooking instant noodles in their teakettle. (It’s more people than you’d think for a hotel charging upwards of $1,500 per night—and the remains can attract smells or worse if they’re not properly cleaned up.)
Ultimately the goal is to offer perks and comforts that uniquely delight a specific person or group. What to do for the three “brothers” sharing one king bed? I suggested a platter of sandwich cookies, but Cheah thought that was too on the nose.
Crazy rich Asians outspend Americans 10 to 1
Hoteliers around the world will tell you Americans are the ones driving up room rates—but that’s not true here. Asian power spenders in Singapore are known to drop 10 times as much as their American counterparts. Think $3,000 per head for a power lunch rather than $300, or $200,000 for a rare handbag instead of a mere $20,000 Birkin. In short: New wealth in Asia puts old money in the West to shame. And it’s all cash.
A chef-owner of a beloved Michelin-starred restaurant in town told me in confidence that one of his servers once accidentally spilled a droplet of oil on a patron’s purse, staining the material. Without flinching he offered to fix it. The bag turned out to be so expensive, the repair threatened to shutter his establishment. (Raffles maintains relationships with pros at all the major brands in case of such emergencies.)
“I never understood the wealth of Chinese people until I started working at Marina Bay Sands,” says Cheah, who spent seven years as a butler at that decadent destination across town before joining Raffles. During a regular four- or five-night stay, visiting housewives would drop S$300,000 ($223,000) on a single spree at the on-site luxury mall. “They did this every day, every time they went out. Louis Vuitton, Hermès,” Cheah says. “You’d step into their suite and couldn’t even see the floor there are so many shopping bags everywhere.”
And their children are shopaholics in training. “I once had a guest who was less than 12 years old,” says Shannon Goh, one of my butler colleagues. “He wanted the Dior kids store to close later for him so he could do some last-minute shopping.” At 11 p.m., after less than an hour in the boutique, the tween had bought S$60,000 worth. At another point he purchased an entire aisle at Toys “R” Us with a single hand gesture.
Status symbols range from cars to crabs
Rare handbags aren’t even close to being the biggest status symbols in Singapore. Here, buying a car is an eye-watering expense—a Toyota Camry hybrid, for example, can run you $193,870 when you factor in taxes and the required purchase of a certificate of entitlement. (Think of it like a medallion for a New York cabdriver, used here to curb congestion.) “Even just throwing keys down on the table is a baller move,” says a former Raffles employee.
But forget Fendi and Ferrari (or Toyota for that matter)—the real braggadocio comes with food, seafood in particular. Cheah tells me that at Imperial Treasure, the city’s most revered temple to seafood and the most requested reservation at the concierge desk, a bowl of shark fin soup the size of your fist could easily go for S$300.
Rare edible bird’s nests—made by swallows out of hardened saliva rather than twigs—sell for as much as S$9,500 per kilo before they’re melted into a S$300 stew. Receipts often stretch into the mid-five figures, and that’s for lunch.
Once, a tech tycoon with an 11-digit fortune requested a particularly exotic species of hairy crab be cooked for him and his entourage. The butlers had to go full Cousteau in their search.
When they finally tracked one down from a specialist vendor, it cost several thousand dollars for a single crab to be fished out of a specific lake in China and freighted. Then the kitchen had to figure out what to do with it. Presumably they did a good job—he requested another one for dinner the next day.
These flexes continue until the minute patrons leave on their jet, as many use their private plane to fly edible souvenirs back home. A colleague told me he was once given 12 hours to source S$10,000 worth (about 1,500 pounds) of durian. The fruit has such a famously pungent smell, it’s been banned—like cigarettes—in hotel rooms.
During my stint, one late-night caller demanded 50 chiffon pandan cakes—an airy confection made with a local green fruit—to be delivered by 8 a.m. before a private flight. Never mind that all the bakeries were shut by then. “I tracked down a staff member of a closed bakery nearby and offered to pay them double—triple—for their help,” says assistant head butler Kimberly Tan, who pulled off the (seemingly) impossible feat.
For VVIPs, everything is personal(ized)
Several times a month, senior members of the team are tapped for personal butler duty—a special designation in which a butler is on call 24/7 to offer one-on-one service for a VVIP. A personal butler can be responsible for, say, chaperoning guests on shopping sprees or babysitting children. (The go-to move for that is to set up a pizza-making class at the on-site Italian restaurant and then turn a suite into a mini movie theater.)
Sometimes butlers double as tour guides. Hotel management considers it “vital” that butlers be able to rattle off factoids about Singapore’s heritage, including some of the 1,000-plus orchid species on view at the national botanical gardens.
One VVIP requested the specific Coca-Cola that’s bottled in Indonesia. Another would only touch Shu Uemura skin-care products but didn’t bring any with him. Yet another craved fruit, but only bright red PiqaBoo pears, crossbred on a special farm in New Zealand.
Bringing in a preferred brand can be an especially heavy lift. Once, concierge Roslee Sukar remembers, a large crate was delivered to the hotel and placed in a guest’s suite, not to be opened until its obsessive owner, who rang daily, had physically checked in.
“Everyone thought it was going to be a giant safe filled with gold bars for tips,” Sukar says with a laugh. Nope: It was a Miele washing machine—the guest in question would only allow his clothing to be cleaned using that particular German brand.
Celebrities just want to be treated like children
Famous VIPs often have their assistants send along a rider—a list of requests, sometimes filed under an alias for added privacy. Our database was crowded with bombastic pseudonyms: Mr. King, Mrs. Princess, Mr. Pope, even a Mr. President.
Requests come in all colors and sizes. One pop star wanted the bathroom stocked with pink toilet paper. Another asked me to prep the tub with ice cubes that were all the same exact size for a post-concert cold plunge. But most requests I fielded were ordinary: apple juice, pita chips, virgin piña coladas and cheese pizzas. A-listers “all kinda want kid food,” a colleague says.
Recently we organized an elaborate half-day food tour for a young singer, only for the star to return 30 minutes later with a hefty bag of McDonald’s. When Michael Jackson would visit, he’d bring along his own chef, whom he’d send to the kitchen to make macaroni and cheese. Sukar says the King of Pop ranks as one of his favorite guests: “He was very down-to-earth—he always offered me fries.”
The customer is not always right
When there’s seemingly no restriction to wish fulfillment, the requests can get downright quirky.
“I had a guest once ask me for a body bag,” remembers chef concierge Hafiz Samat, laughing. “She needed 100 of them. I called everyone: funeral homes, hospitals. I even asked my cousin who was a police officer. I finally found something on the internet in the United States.” No, there wasn’t a murder on the property; the guest was helping the Indonesian Red Cross source higher-quality corpse carriers.
But there are, in fact, limits to Raffles’ blue-sky hospitality. Requests for condoms are duly fulfilled, but the line is drawn at sex toys, which butlers won’t handle in any capacity. Smuggling in exotic pets from other countries? “I’ve tried,” Sukar says. “We’ve petitioned customs to waive the 14-day quarantine, but we were denied.” Butlers won’t break laws, but for the same client they were able to host a few small animals from the national zoo.
The Long Bar makes about $10 million a year on its most famous drink
Perhaps even more famous than the hotel itself is its Long Bar, where the colorful, fruity Singapore sling was invented in 1915. The bar sells 800 to 1,200 slings daily, estimates Sivam Kaliappan, the assistant manager.
I swapped my butler suit for a barkeep’s uniform to spend a day working there, earning a sore shoulder for the privilege. To keep up with orders, you need to be able to measure and shake all of the six ingredients in less than a minute. That tempo starts even before the doors open: I whipped up 36 slings right before a long queue of eager drinkers was let in at noon, and all those cocktails had been guzzled by 12:30 p.m.
The best part of the job is working the antique cocktail crank on the bar top. It gets loaded with six shakers, and you spin the handle for exactly 30 seconds—no more, no less. It saves time and guards against muscle aches, and the customers love it. They brandished their smartphones and cheered every time I wound the rusty green machine.
Each Singapore sling costs S$39, or S$42 after tax. “And each cocktail costs about S$4 to make, so that’s a 900% markup,” a former Long Bar bartender tells me. “It’s common to do nearly S$15,000 in two hours,” Kaliappan says. That adds up to almost S$15 million a year in slings alone—and 70% of the bar’s total revenue.
Here are some patterns I noticed after serving a shift’s worth of customers: Australians tend to order two drinks at once—a sling and a beer. Japanese visitors sip very slowly and rest between beverages. American women will endlessly suggest recipe tweaks to suit their dietary quirks, be it replacing the sugary pineapple juice with soda water or swapping gin for slightly less caloric vodka.
“Brits can go for five or six slings,” bar manager Ling Ying Hui says. “The most slings ordered in a single sitting was 16, and the guy’s wife had 11 or 12—they were on their honeymoon.” That’s almost S$1,200 total, in case you were counting.
Butlering at Raffles is exacting work, but it’s easier than some Singaporean alternatives
As it turns out, Raffles’ guests bring along one thing, in addition to their endless cash, that the guests at competing hotels often leave behind: decorum. That’s why so many of my colleagues were relieved to have landed here. Many had seen the opposite at the casino-centric Marina Bay Sands.
“I would regularly watch guests lose S$35 million—even S$40 million—in a couple of hours,” says one former Marina Bay Sands butler. “One guest left S$87,000 in cash in a drawer in his room.” When they contacted him, “he requested that it be left at the hotel so he could gamble it some other time.” On the upside, it wasn’t uncommon to get tipped S$1,000 for holding a door, another tells me.
“We did have an Asian gentleman who flew in on his private jet and had his first wife and kids in one suite and a second wife and kids in another—neither knew that the other existed,” says another former Marina Bay Sands butler. “We were in charge of keeping the two families separate.” It worked—the wives always assumed their husband was having fun in the casino. (In fairness, he mostly was.)
“If you’re not careful, you can become intoxicated by all the cash being thrown around,” Cheah warns. But to him, it’s not the quiet luxury that sets Raffles apart. At the end of our daily briefings, he reminds us that it’s the butlers’ genuinely personal touch that forms the backbone of the hotel’s luxury credo. “Remember,” Cheah says, “without you, this is just a Four Seasons.”