- Princess Diana reportedly used to play games with paparazzi who followed her around on vacation.
- When skiing in Austria, she and lookalike hotel guests were said to have dressed alike to fool them.
- Hannes Schneider, owner of the hotel she visited in Austria, said "it was a big game" to Diana.
Princess Diana befriended guests on vacation who looked exactly like her to play pranks on the paparazzi, the owner of a hotel she used to visit when skiing in Austria told Insider.
For five years during the 1990s, Diana would visit Lech — a luxury ski village in Austria — and would often be spotted on the slopes or walking around town with a young Prince William and Prince Harry. According to Tatler, Elizabeth Debicki, who is set to play the princess on "The Crown," was spotted on set wearing an outfit Diana wore while on vacation in the village in 1994, so it's likely scenes recreating her time spent there will feature in the upcoming fifth series.
But according to Hannes Schneider, owner of the family-run five-star Hotel Arlberg that Diana chose to stay at whenever she came to Lech, the princess had "really good fun" playing pranks on paparazzi while on vacation. Because she was a global style icon, Schneider said, several guests vacationing at the hotel at the same time as her copied her style and looked nearly identical to her.
"Being here for five long years, she always met the same people," Schneider said. "The ladies at that time tried to be her, same hair, same style."
According to Schneider, Diana met two women from Germany and America who were the "same age, same size" as her and all three of them would dress up in the same outfits to fool the "Fleet Street" paparazzi who followed her from the UK to Austria.
"It was really good fun," Schneider said. "They had big fun leaving the house at the same time."
"The paparazzi in one out of three cases followed the wrong one. It was a big game," he added.
Over the years that Diana returned to the Hotel Arlberg, Schneider said he formed a very close friendship with her and "was probably the person in Austria who knew her the best."
"I had Wills and Harry on my hip at that time," he said. At one point, he said the princess asked him whether he would be her "personal" security officer. "We got so close at the end, it was really a great experience."
But using lookalikes isn't the only strategy Diana is said to have had for dealing with the press. Back home in the UK, she reportedly wore the same Virgin Atlantic sweatshirt to every single gym session to deter paparazzi.
According to W Magazine, her personal trainer Jenni Rivett wrote a letter about Diana's gym strategy when auctioning off the sweater in 2019.
Rivett wrote that Diana "felt there were far more important issues to focus on in the world than her gym attire and therefore decided that wearing the famous Virgin sweatshirt to every session would be a good way to stop the media frenzy."
Speaking to Kate Thornton on Yahoo's The Royal Box Series, Rivett said wearing the same sweater was "one of her strategies" when dealing with the media, Hello Magazine reported.
Thornton asked, "So that the picture lost its currency?" To which Jenni responded: "Exactly. And I thought that was very clever of her."