Swiss hotelier travels 5,000 miles to apologize

Companies sometimes make mistakes: Hotels forget to put enough towels in the room, restaurants bring the wrong dish, bar codes get mixed up and a retailer charges the wrong price.

Usually it's not a big deal. A delivery of the missing products or services, a price adjustment and off we go.

But when a mistake recently was made at a hotel in Switzerland, the manager ended up traveling nearly 5,000 miles to apologize to the customer and deliver a refund.

"It is customary in China to admit your faults," Sandro Bernasconi told reporters for 20 Minuten, a German-language, Swiss newspaper.

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The story also was carried by English-language the Local, which explained the problem developed when a Chinese traveler stopped in at the Swiss resort, the Devil's Place Whiskey Bar at the Waldhaus Hotel in St. Moritz, and asked about a very rare Macallans whiskey.

The bar had purchased an "1878" bottle more than two decades earlier, and since it was priced at roughly $10,000 per shot, not surprisingly it was still around.

So the visitor bought a shot and went on his way, eventually returning to China.

However, several questions were raised about the product, and the hotel, which is known for its Guinness Book of World Records collection of whiskey, eventually summoned a company with expertise in the forensic analysis of whiskey.

It was the conclusion of that company, Rare Whisky 101, that prompted Bernasconi to make travel plans.

Apparently, the whiskey label had been faked, and the drink, thought to be from 1878, was from about 1970, the report said. The analysts knew that because they carbon-dated it.

Bernasconi explained he had to show that "the Swiss are honest people and do not engage in scams."

The German-language report identified the purchaser as Wei Zhang, China's highest-paid online author, who writes fantasy stories under the name Tang Jia San Shao.

The report said there were "obviously no hard feelings, as the two men then went out for dinner and had a discussion about whiskies."

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