I am Iris Fenwick. I compile this from a flat in Bristol, and I have never been paid a penny by anybody in Monaco.
March 2017
A friend turned forty and decided Nice was the place to do it. On the Sunday four of us took the number 100 bus down the coast to Monaco, because that is what you do, and at about nine in the evening we walked up to the Casino de Monte-Carlo. Three of us went in. I did not, because I was wearing trainers.
What annoyed me was not the rule. The rule is the rule, and it is theirs to set. What annoyed me was that I had spent the flight reading about the place and nothing I read had told me. The pieces were all about atmosphere: the Belle Epoque, the marble, Grace Kelly, a sentence about James Bond. Not one of them said "there is a fee at the door and they will look at your shoes".
What this is now
A dossier on the entry conditions at Monte-Carlo's best-known addresses. Five files, one table, and a scoring system that measures access rather than luxury, because there are a hundred sites that will tell you the Hermitage is lovely and rather fewer that will tell you what happens when you arrive at the door of it.
The method is deliberately dull. I read what the operator publishes. Where SBM's own pages disagree with each other, and they do, I print both numbers and say they disagree. Where I cannot verify something, I write that I cannot verify it. There are three unverified facts in the Hermitage file alone and they are all still sitting there marked as unverified, because a marked gap is more use to you than a confident guess.
What this is not
It is not a booking service. I have no rooms, no allocation, no arrangement with anyone. There are no affiliate links here; every outbound link goes to an operator's own site and pays me nothing. Monte-Carlo SBM has never contacted me and I have never contacted them for money.
It is also not an invitation to gamble. I write about buildings and doors. If you want to know how to play trente-et-quarante, this is the wrong dossier, and if you want to know how to win at it, that is the wrong question and there is a page on this site about why.
The limit, stated plainly
I have never stayed a night in any of these hotels. On a Bristol freelance income I am not going to, and I am not going to accept a free night in exchange for a favourable file either, because then the file would be worth nothing. So this dossier can tell you the door price, the dress rule, the crowds, the statute and the operator's own contradictions. It cannot review a suite. Where you see me stop, that is why.
Corrections
The margin note about nationals and residents is the loose thread I most want closed, and I would genuinely rather be corrected than look consistent. If you have a primary source I could not reach, send it: [email protected]. Corrections get made on the page with the date, not quietly.