They may have only spent a few hours in their £95 a night, three-star hotel in northernmost Canada this week. But it seems as if the staff of the Coast High Country Inn, in the former goldrush town of Whitehorse in the Yukon, were leaving nothing to chance. In anticipation of William and Kate’s short overnight stay on Tuesday, they ripped out the existing carpets and replaced them, put in new windows, redid the bathroom, installed new furniture, including a bed, and repainted the walls in a ‘calming’ grey colour specifically to please the couple. A suite with Jacuzzi next door was also converted into a dressing room and down the hall, the owners turned a third room into a private dining room for the couple. In a further effort to make their top suite, currently known as the Premium Jacuzzi King Room, more aesthetically pleasing for their visitors, they borrowed seven works of original First Nations art in the Yukon government’s permanent collection to hang in the suite and other rooms occupied by senior members of their entourage. It now boasts, the hotel’s management say, “the world’s most famous three star hotel room”. Now the firm wants to recoup its investment by installing a photograph of the couple in the room, which boasts a fireplace, kitchenette and double Jacuzzi tub, and renaming it the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge Suite or, perhaps, the Royal Suite. “We’ve been bandying around some possibilities. One we thought of was the Royal Suite,” said Dylan Soo, the hotel’s general manager. “We would like to leverage it as a premium room, or a special or celebrity room at least.” That means a price hike from its current level of 200 Canadian dollars per night. “We are thinking of a putting a 20 to 30 dollars premium on it,” he added. Soo says he also needs to get a picture of the couple to go in the room, after they refused to pose for one with the hotel staff. “One of their stipulations was no pictures. We would have loved to have had a picture them in our guest room or with one of our staff. We did request it. They did deny that request. So we left it at that,” he revealed. Soo, who learned in May that the couple would be staying at the hotel, declined to disclose the cost of the revamp for the royal visit and specifically for renovating their suite. “We had a budget but as the visit got closer the important thing was to get it done well,” he said. The Cambridges and their staff hired out the whole of the top floor while Canadian officials involved in the visit took the rest of the rooms in the three-floor 82-room hotel. As far as Soo is aware, the couple enjoyed their stay but he and most of his staff had little direct contact with William and Kate. Staff who took up food, including an evening platter and a light breakfast in the morning, handed it over to royal aides who took it into the couple. Few staff saw them. “There was a five-second walk through the lobby. They were talking to each other. There was no conversation with anyone who works at the hotel,” Soo said. It is also not clear if they actually ate their evening meal in the hotel. One source claimed that although food was sent up them, William and Kate decided to order out for a pizza. Northern Vision Development, which also owns two other hotels in Whitehorse – the Gold Rush Inn and the Edgewater Hotel – believes the royal visit has put the High Country Inn on the map. Guests have described rooms as being on the small side – one Trip Advisor review said it “the smallest we’ve come across in all our travels around the world” – and others complained about “yellow water” from the hot top or said the rooms were “tired, dated and cramped”. Soo insists that, in spite of a small number of unfavourable reviews, it has been unfairly portrayed. “The standard of rooms here in the north of Canada may not be comparable with metropolitan hotels but we have had the prime minister stay here or at one of our other hotels in Whitehorse for each of the last seven years,” he boasted.