Millennium Mystique

Q. What's the "millennium tariff" all about? Does it apply to me?

A. Forget any ideas you had about the millennium being a caring and sharing time when people join together in an atmosphere of love, peace and understanding. What we're talking about here is one of the biggest commercial cash-in opportunities ever, which will be relentlessly exploited well into the first year of the next century.

As with Christmas, there will be some half-hearted attempts by "religious" types to try to reclaim the date for its alleged spiritual value, but the bottom dollar here is the amount of hard cash that will be prised out of your open hands.

There will be a massive advertising and marketing hard sell which will try to convince you that the only possible way you can celebrate the dawn of year 2000 is by paying over the odds for it.

The "millennium tariff" primarily refers to how anything remotely concerned with travel or entertainment will cost up to 10 times more than usual in the last days of this year. And it won't end there. Everybody will be looking for a slice of the millennium buck whether it be as naff as commemorative tea-towels or as expensive as specially designed jewellery.

The tariff will come into its own on New Year's Eve this year when businesses will ambush revellers with their "competitive millennial rates" and it's already been predicted that so high will be the cost of travel and entertainment on this night alone that it will totally skew the monthly inflation statistics.

People thinking of even the medium luxury of booking into a deluxe hotel for the night in question had better check out the going rates before reserving anything. Top of the range, at the moment, is the Ritz-Carlton hotel group whose London sales office is offering an "experience" in any of their 35 international hotels: £60,000 per couple for three nights over the millennium. Rather magnanimously they are throwing in two 18-carat gold Bulgari Chrono watches as part of the "experience".

More down-market experiences can be found in Edinburgh (which because of its track record on New Year events, will be one of the world's leading millennium celebration cities) where a weekend in the Balmoral Hotel will cost a mere £8,500, but there are no watches, mind you.

While Irish hotels are reluctant to discuss vulgar money issues, it is known that Dublin's Clarence Hotel has already been booked by one private party (answers on a postcard . . .) while Limerick's Dromoland Castle has been booked since 1990 and the not-so-far-away Glin Castle has been booked since 1995. There still may be vacancies at Kenmare's Park Hotel which has a five-day package for £1,850 per person.

Part of the reason the tariff is so high is that nobody wants to miss the celebrations, and the labour shortage means people are negotiating their own rates to work on the night. The Evening Standard reports that London hotel staff, waiters and bar staff are being offered £1,000 for a night's work and there is already talk of other hotels and restaurants "gazumping" their rivals to get the staff on the night.

The most novel idea is that of the "Avoid The Millennium Time Capsule" at London's Four Seasons Hotel, where the ninth floor will be blacked out and soundproofed. All clocks and calendars will be removed and a selection of black-and-white films will be screed on a television set. The whole floor will be given over to the person who makes the highest bid between now and June 1st and the hotel has promised that the difference between the regular rate (£950) and the successful bid will be donated to the Red Cross.