On the winding route from friendship to marriage, Prince William and Kate Middleton have transformed mere buildings into monuments of their love. There’s St. Andrew’s University, where they met as college students in 2001. There’s St. James’s Palace, where they held their engagement-day photo call in November 2010. And, according to Hana Umezawa, who is leading today’s Will & Kate Royal Wedding Walking Tour through London, there’s Mahiki, the Polynesian-themed tiki bar where Wills drowned his sorrows during the couple’s brief split in April 2007. “He reportedly jumped up on a table and yelled out ‘I’m Free!’ to the packed club and went on to rack up a bar tab of £11,050 ,” Umezawa tells a group of 15 mostly American tourists. Jaws drop. A woman orders her husband to take her picture next to a Polynesian idol stationed outside the bar.
Searching the streets of London for the essence of Will and Kate may seem strange — especially since their romance blossomed in Scotland. But in the world of royal-wedding tourism, travel operators know that if you offer it, they will come. Since January, a handful of formal and informal walking tours has cropped up with the promise of retracing Kate and Wills’ footsteps from debauched Mayfair nightclubs to the big day at Westminster Abbey. None is more popular than the Will & Kate Royal Wedding Walking Tour, run by the travel company Celebrity Planet, which has so far escorted 700 tourists around Prince William’s favorite haunts for the princely sum of £15 a head. “Americans are obsessed with our royal family,” says James Bonney, the firm’s founder. “You could just walk around these landmarks on your own, but you haven’t taken the time to compile the depth and knowledge we impart on you. People pay for the story.”
