As each Met Gala becomes bigger and bigger, where attendees stay has become almost as critical as what they wear. While many chose The Mark or The Carlyle, a newer hotel to the scene isThe Surrey,which reopened in fall 2024 on East 76th Street and hosted attendees of the Met Gala for the first time last year.
Zendaya, Angela Bassett, Regé-Jean Page, Cardi B, model Liu Wen, and several New York Liberty players were among those guests who got ready at The Surrey for fashion’s biggest night. “Any and every guest that walks into our hotel, or has walked into our hotel, is equally important to us. We have ensured that they feel the sense of privacy, security, and the care that they would expect when they are in their private homes,” says the property’s Managing Director Pradeep Raman.
Planning for the first Monday in May begins twelve months out, and Raman and his team work to make sure no detail is forgotten. “I’m just conducting the orchestra,” he says. Ahead of this year’s Met Gala, Raman spoke withTown & Countryabout the organized (and color-coded) chaos of Met Gala Monday at The Surrey.
Well, we started preparing last year on the 5th of May! The uniqueness about the Met Gala is it’s constant preparation because there are so many details and logistics. About three months ahead of time, we solidify our strategy, our game plan, and all our needs and must-haves. Then, we start putting together the guest list and we start putting together the guests that are there. Our team here also contacts the team members of the guests that are coming in to get to know about their needs, their wants, and also how many members are going to meet the team. It’s pretty much a year-round cycle. And our goal obviously is to learn from the past to ensure that we have that well-documented. So we are able to actually enhance and build on what we’ve already created in terms of product, service delivery, execution, social media strategies, and the overall day in general.
Our firm belief for the hotel is [prioritizing] our guest safety, security, and their privacy. Because I strongly believe, and we believe as a group, that our guests will only trust us and we’ll get loyalty out of them if we treat them as human beings, and we treat them in a way where they feel comfortable enough to come back. The good news is this year we have over 60% of our [Met Gala] guests from last year that are coming back. Which means we are doing a lot of things right.
Out security is very important that day. We have a very stringent security presence on property in every entry and exit point. So these guests that are on the list are given a particular color-coded lanyard, so this way we are able to know exactly who is going where. And once they come into the hotel, we fact check and we verify that they are on the list and they are the guest for a particular guest room, and we let them in. All our elevators are operated by our security personnel on that day. And every single floor, we have one of our key department leaders, our team leaders that is there with a walkie-talkie that coordinates with our head of security who takes control of the property. Communication is something which I believe on days like these cannot be broken, and it has to be absolutely tactful and it has to be very, very clear. So that’s one part of it.
We also limit the access to anybody that should not be there into the hotel. So we strategically place furniture and we strategically have people that are located in certain areas of the hotel, so we don’t have guests that should not be there.
We don’t prioritize a particular celebrity, because for us, every single guest is equally important on that day because they all are going to the same location and they all have commitments. So we are very cognizant of that. In terms of priority, obviously, I think the guests have already informed us what time they’re arriving and what time they’re departing, so we have that. Then we work backwards from there.
The exit strategy is we also work with our limousine company and with our security and our head concierge, and we assign them a VP of exit strategy. That’s literally the title I’ve given them: They’re the vice president of exit. So what that entails is that they have the agenda for these guests that are departing, and we actually not only color code the cars, we also place the car numbers and the dashboard, and we communicate with the guest advance team in advance to let them know as to what time they’re going to depart the hotel.
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We line up the cars well in advance. So the car pulls out, the guests come out, and the photographers that are outside the hotel take photos and the guests can directly go into the vehicles. So this way, there’s minimum to no interruptions on their exit because we understand that a lot of these guests are very focused on getting there on time and the dresses are important.
Although I have to say last year, there were some guests who actually broke the protocol and they still wanted to take a lot of photos, so they ended up standing in front for longer than we thought they should. But again, they were comfortable with it, so as long as they were comfortable, we were okay with it. And they left very happy, and we had limited to no interruptions whatsoever.
It depends what the guest wants. When we opened this hotel, we were very conscious of the fact that we needed to be as New York as possible. And how do you do that? One of the big things we did was our investment in art. So all our guest rooms have Jansson Stegner artwork. You enter the lobby and there’s beautiful Alex Katzthat hangs in the lobby by the elevators, which has been a huge talking point for a lot of our guests that are art connoisseurs. Then obviously also in a guest hallways, it is the same. We have selected artwork in our guest hallways. So we’ve had a lot of guests that have taken photo moments, not just in hallways, but also in the guest rooms, and also in the front of the hotel.
I would also go to the extent of saying our commitment to art also stemmed from our design focus. We worked with Martin Brudnizki to do the interior design. Martin, as you may know, is somebody who’s very out there. He’s very ambitious. He likes a lot of color. For us to be part of the Upper East Side, we were very conscious of ensuring that we have monotone colors and that we represent the Upper East Side in the neighborhood, very importantly. So it gives you a residential feel and it’s like you feel like you are in your home. We’ve noticed that a guest really likes that. So right in the lobby, for example, it makes for an amazing photographic moment because you have not just the lighting, but you have an Alex Katz in the background, custom-made chandeliers, and this beautiful marble that inspired by the Carrara marbles from Italy that we’ve actually put together.
So I would say the lobby for a guest that wants to take a follow-up moment before departure, but we also have guests who’ve taken pictures in the guest hallways right after they’ve dressed themselves
How much time do you have? This first thing is this location. So we are pretty much in the corner of 76th and Madison. So one of the key logistical nightmares that a lot of guests have is the direction of traffic on that day. So our guests can board their cars on 76th. All they have to do is make a left on Madison and go all the way down to the men. In certain instances, get off on 79th Street, or if they’re part of one of the co-chairs, then they go straight from Madison onto 84th Street and they’re able to get to Met. So I would say location is a key. The ease with which they can get from point A to point B is one of the things.
The second thing I’d like to say is the trust that we’ve built with our guests and their teams in terms of our preparedness to welcome them. So what we’ve done is every guest that’s staying as part of Met, we’re sending them pre-stay questionnaires with very specifics on what kind of glam squad details do the need, what kind of food do they need… We’ve pre-prepared a set menu with room service, for example, because we understand that they want to be ordering food, and rather than them waste their time on the phone trying to figure out menu, we’ve been proactive and given them three or four options. So during the reservation time, we also send them this pre-prepared room service option that they can tick mark and they can pick and choose. So it’s already pre-prepared. And all we have to do is once we have the time, we send it up to them.
Given the legacy of us as a Corinthia, taking it from where our first primary hotel was in London, where we had the reputation of managing these celebrities and these caliber of guests. The reason I say caliber of guests particularly is because we know on the biggest day for the fashion industry, the guests can be extremely nervous, they can be very much time-conscious, and sometimes they might forget some details. So what we do is know having our experience of dealing with these guests, we actually, ahead of time, we ask them these questions, so we are very prepared with simple things like safety pins. Last year, fortunately we had a lot of safety pins that we kept in the bucket with housekeeping. And you’d be shocked to know so many of these stylists called frantically to our housekeeping team and said, “Do you have safety pins?” Our question to them was, “How many do you need?”
I respect what the competitors are doing. I respect the fact that they are successful because they’ve done things well, but I also feel like we have also done things very well from our end. Our motto has not been to just publicize the fact that we were a new hotel last year, we no longer are, but proofs in the pudding. So we have delivered on what we’ve committed to. And the fact that we have so many of our guests that are coming back from last year gives me the conviction that we as a team have not only delivered, but we have kept our commitment to our guests and they believe in us so they can come back.
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