If you're like me (and pray that you aren't), then you love contests. I'm all about the free stuff, baby...
Anywho -- the Boulders Resort and Golden Door Spa in Scottsdale Arizona is having a contest: "Name Our Cactus".
That's right, name one (or all 6) cacti and be entered to win a free trip to the resort.
How cool is that!
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Worst of the worst: Barcelo Talanquera...
Time for another installment of "Worst of the worst", where we spotlight a negative review. The following review is from a guest who stayed at the Barcelo Talanquera in the Dominican Republic.
You can view the original review, or check out the Barcelo Talanquera for yourself.
See you next time!
I WOULD GIVE THIS PLACE A NEGATIVE STAR IF IT WOULD LET ME. THIS PLACE WAS THE MOST HORRIBLE PLACE I EVER STAYED THE PICTURES THAT ARE SHOWN ARE NONE EXISTANT THE ROOMS ARE MUSKY AND THE AC DOES NOT WORK THE EMPLOYEES THERE HATE AMERICANS AND EUROPEANS THEY ACT LIKE THEY ARE DOING YOU A FAVOR. ITS NOT ALL INCLUSIVE HAVE TO PAY TO EAT IN CERTAIN AREAS THAT IS NOT ADVERTISED. SECURITY DOES NOTHING HAD ITEMS STOLEN FROM MY ROOM MANAGEMENT DID NOTHING BUT TOLD US TOO BAD SORRY. HAS OPEN DOOR POLICY FOR ANYONE TO COME OFF THE STREET FOR THE DAY, DID NOT GET TO EVEN USE THE POOL BECAUSE THE PEOPLE LET IN ACT LIKE ANIMALS ALSO RAID THE BUFFET AREA LIKE THEY HAVENT EATEN IN DAYS. SAVE YOUR TIME, AGGRIVATTION AND SANITY STAY AWAY FROM THIS HOTEL. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED
You can view the original review, or check out the Barcelo Talanquera for yourself.
See you next time!
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Cool idea! The "Green" hotel room keycard...
Saw a write-up about Green-Key recently and wanted to share with the rest of the world.
"Green-Key™ is an environmentally friendly alternative to the traditional plastic hotel keycard. Unlike plastic keycards, Green-Key™ is recyclable, biodegradable and produced from paperboard, a renewable resource. Its paperboard construction also makes it an economical choice versus other high priced eco-friendly products."
What a great idea. I know I don't always turn my room key card back in at the front desk, and I usually end up throwing them away. This is an awesome idea, and I hope hotels seek this (or others, if there are any) out.
"Green-Key™ is an environmentally friendly alternative to the traditional plastic hotel keycard. Unlike plastic keycards, Green-Key™ is recyclable, biodegradable and produced from paperboard, a renewable resource. Its paperboard construction also makes it an economical choice versus other high priced eco-friendly products."
What a great idea. I know I don't always turn my room key card back in at the front desk, and I usually end up throwing them away. This is an awesome idea, and I hope hotels seek this (or others, if there are any) out.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
From around the web: Google Mum On Plans to Build Hotel/Convention Center
Google missed a deadline on Friday to cough up plans for a new hotel and convention center in Mountain View, according to the Palo Alto Daily News.
read more | digg story
read more | digg story
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
From around the web: The smoke patrol: Hotel is nation's first to reward its sniff-staff
By Louis R. Carlozo, Chicago Tribune McClatchy-Tribune Regional News
Feb. 19--Ever since she was a little girl in the Robert Taylor Homes, Linda Davis has hated cigarette smoke -- hated it. The soft-spoken Swissotel housekeeper, who wears a four-star-crisp white apron and immaculate matching sneakers and socks, winces at the memory of her mom filling her childhood home with billows of tobacco exhaust.
To demonstrate how it makes her feel, she massages her temples as if fighting off another tension headache -- the kind she gets only when facing the remains of cigarettes, pipes or cigars.
Especially cigars. "They're the worst," says Davis, 34, her ever-present smile curdling for a moment in disgust.
Back when her mother turned the family apartment into a smoke box, Davis fought back by flinging open the windows, even when winter weather might discourage it. Now, when Davis walks into a Swissotel room and catches that telltale scent -- and she can always catch it, thanks to her hair-trigger headaches -- she sets about freshening the premises, changing the linens.
Then she turns the guest in, for which she gets a $10 reward -- while the offender gets slapped with a $250 fine.
Swissotel isn't the first Chicago hotel to ban smoking and levy stiff penalties against rule breakers. But with a top-to-bottom renovation of 632 rooms under way, Swissotel is getting extra tough, paying housekeepers such as Davis for turning in no-smoking scofflaws. This makes Swissotel the only hotel in the country that rewards staff for collaring smokers in its rooms, according to the American Hotel & Lodging Association, a trade group in Washington.
As for why Swissotel went to such lengths to extinguish smoking, "It was quite simple, really," says hotel manager Jack Breisacher. "The housekeepers spend between 30 and 45 minutes in the guest room and they were being impacted healthwise; they taste the smoke and breathe the smoke. So even without the meager $10 we give them, they're quite on board."
That goes for his guests, too: "We started a blog a few weeks ago and the response was unbelievably in favor. Of the 50 or so people who wrote in only two said, 'We can't believe you're turning the maids into vigilantes.' But some people are saying, 'We can't believe you didn't do this sooner.'"
What's more, three staffers have since quit smoking. Breisacher's thrilled, for the most part.
"I wish I could get my wife to stop," he says.
The strategy also points to Chicago hotels as another front line in the city's ongoing battle against smokers. Swissotel doesn't just want to sweep out the ashes -- it's shooting for green certification from the city, meaning it has to prove the building has superior air quality. To that end, Davis maintains she's caught a few people each week since Swissotel's all-room smoking ban began Dec. 3. To date, 22 guests have gotten socked with fines -- with two granted amnesty because it turned out that friends did the smoking, according to hotel officials.
While not on the level of "CSI: Swissotel," Davis and her co-workers rely on circumstantial evidence to prove a case of surreptitious smoking. Besides using her sense of smell, Davis inspects for telltale signs of cheating. Smokers for example often use glasses as ashtrays then wash out the offending ash. The visual evidence may be gone but in many cases, odor lingers in the glass. Or a guest might spray air freshener in the room. That's often a dead giveaway, because Swissotel doesn't spray cheap scents in its rooms (let alone ones commingled with the aroma of stale ash).
When Davis thinks she's got a live one, she reports it to John Weiss, Swissotel's head of housekeeping. More sniffing ensues; if they make the determination that someone has been puffing in the room, they take it to the hotel brass. So far no one has fought the charges for covert smoking, save those two whose pals did the puffing.
Some guests have even been fined after checking out.
How much dough has Davis made on all that illicit smoke? "It's not really about the money," she insists. "It's about my health. It just slows you down."
Even more so when some cagey puffers try to make a game of it. "I had one guest who stayed with us three days -- and he would hide his cigarettes under a mattress," Davis recalls. "And he'd say, 'Oh, you don't have to make the bed today.' But I'm going in there with a fresh nose."
Does she feel bad turning in, say, big-tipping tobacco truants? "Sometimes," she says. Then she remembers her headaches and gets ornery: "It gets me dizzy, like a hangover."
A few steps north at the Michigan Avenue Marriott, a similar ban has been in place since September 2006, with an identical $250 fine. As for turning housekeepers into paid mercenaries on the no-smoking front, "We do not do that, but I think it's a clever idea," says Marriott general manager Doug Ridge. As for how many smokers they catch, Ridge estimates the number at fewer than a dozen per year.
"We don't make money off it," Ridge says of the fines. "Depending on how strong the smell of the smoke is, we lose the room from inventory for two to three days."
Ditto at Swissotel, where it costs at least $400 to refurbish a room back to its pre-smoky state. The painstaking process begins with a total washdown of all surfaces -- hard-cased woods get lathered in oil soap, draperies stripped, feather duvets and bed skirts dry cleaned, bathroom surfaces scrubbed.
When all that's done, an ionizer the size of a large toaster oven -- known to the hotel staff as "the red box" -- sanitizes the air overnight. Because it produces pure oxygen, no one can stay in a guest room while it runs.
While the policy change has been personally rough on some Swissotel employees -- including Weiss, who admits to smoking nearly a pack a day -- Davis loves the sharp drop in headaches she's experienced as the hotel has phased out smoking. She celebrated her ninth year at Swissotel on Friday; about a decade ago, the building had roughly 170 smoking rooms on nine floors.
Maybe it's all that clean air that's making Davis extra feisty. "I know somebody's been smoking up there sometime today," she says, sounding more like a sly private eye than a meek maid. "And I'm going to find them."
Feb. 19--Ever since she was a little girl in the Robert Taylor Homes, Linda Davis has hated cigarette smoke -- hated it. The soft-spoken Swissotel housekeeper, who wears a four-star-crisp white apron and immaculate matching sneakers and socks, winces at the memory of her mom filling her childhood home with billows of tobacco exhaust.
To demonstrate how it makes her feel, she massages her temples as if fighting off another tension headache -- the kind she gets only when facing the remains of cigarettes, pipes or cigars.
Especially cigars. "They're the worst," says Davis, 34, her ever-present smile curdling for a moment in disgust.
Back when her mother turned the family apartment into a smoke box, Davis fought back by flinging open the windows, even when winter weather might discourage it. Now, when Davis walks into a Swissotel room and catches that telltale scent -- and she can always catch it, thanks to her hair-trigger headaches -- she sets about freshening the premises, changing the linens.
Then she turns the guest in, for which she gets a $10 reward -- while the offender gets slapped with a $250 fine.
Swissotel isn't the first Chicago hotel to ban smoking and levy stiff penalties against rule breakers. But with a top-to-bottom renovation of 632 rooms under way, Swissotel is getting extra tough, paying housekeepers such as Davis for turning in no-smoking scofflaws. This makes Swissotel the only hotel in the country that rewards staff for collaring smokers in its rooms, according to the American Hotel & Lodging Association, a trade group in Washington.
As for why Swissotel went to such lengths to extinguish smoking, "It was quite simple, really," says hotel manager Jack Breisacher. "The housekeepers spend between 30 and 45 minutes in the guest room and they were being impacted healthwise; they taste the smoke and breathe the smoke. So even without the meager $10 we give them, they're quite on board."
That goes for his guests, too: "We started a blog a few weeks ago and the response was unbelievably in favor. Of the 50 or so people who wrote in only two said, 'We can't believe you're turning the maids into vigilantes.' But some people are saying, 'We can't believe you didn't do this sooner.'"
What's more, three staffers have since quit smoking. Breisacher's thrilled, for the most part.
"I wish I could get my wife to stop," he says.
The strategy also points to Chicago hotels as another front line in the city's ongoing battle against smokers. Swissotel doesn't just want to sweep out the ashes -- it's shooting for green certification from the city, meaning it has to prove the building has superior air quality. To that end, Davis maintains she's caught a few people each week since Swissotel's all-room smoking ban began Dec. 3. To date, 22 guests have gotten socked with fines -- with two granted amnesty because it turned out that friends did the smoking, according to hotel officials.
While not on the level of "CSI: Swissotel," Davis and her co-workers rely on circumstantial evidence to prove a case of surreptitious smoking. Besides using her sense of smell, Davis inspects for telltale signs of cheating. Smokers for example often use glasses as ashtrays then wash out the offending ash. The visual evidence may be gone but in many cases, odor lingers in the glass. Or a guest might spray air freshener in the room. That's often a dead giveaway, because Swissotel doesn't spray cheap scents in its rooms (let alone ones commingled with the aroma of stale ash).
When Davis thinks she's got a live one, she reports it to John Weiss, Swissotel's head of housekeeping. More sniffing ensues; if they make the determination that someone has been puffing in the room, they take it to the hotel brass. So far no one has fought the charges for covert smoking, save those two whose pals did the puffing.
Some guests have even been fined after checking out.
How much dough has Davis made on all that illicit smoke? "It's not really about the money," she insists. "It's about my health. It just slows you down."
Even more so when some cagey puffers try to make a game of it. "I had one guest who stayed with us three days -- and he would hide his cigarettes under a mattress," Davis recalls. "And he'd say, 'Oh, you don't have to make the bed today.' But I'm going in there with a fresh nose."
Does she feel bad turning in, say, big-tipping tobacco truants? "Sometimes," she says. Then she remembers her headaches and gets ornery: "It gets me dizzy, like a hangover."
A few steps north at the Michigan Avenue Marriott, a similar ban has been in place since September 2006, with an identical $250 fine. As for turning housekeepers into paid mercenaries on the no-smoking front, "We do not do that, but I think it's a clever idea," says Marriott general manager Doug Ridge. As for how many smokers they catch, Ridge estimates the number at fewer than a dozen per year.
"We don't make money off it," Ridge says of the fines. "Depending on how strong the smell of the smoke is, we lose the room from inventory for two to three days."
Ditto at Swissotel, where it costs at least $400 to refurbish a room back to its pre-smoky state. The painstaking process begins with a total washdown of all surfaces -- hard-cased woods get lathered in oil soap, draperies stripped, feather duvets and bed skirts dry cleaned, bathroom surfaces scrubbed.
When all that's done, an ionizer the size of a large toaster oven -- known to the hotel staff as "the red box" -- sanitizes the air overnight. Because it produces pure oxygen, no one can stay in a guest room while it runs.
While the policy change has been personally rough on some Swissotel employees -- including Weiss, who admits to smoking nearly a pack a day -- Davis loves the sharp drop in headaches she's experienced as the hotel has phased out smoking. She celebrated her ninth year at Swissotel on Friday; about a decade ago, the building had roughly 170 smoking rooms on nine floors.
Maybe it's all that clean air that's making Davis extra feisty. "I know somebody's been smoking up there sometime today," she says, sounding more like a sly private eye than a meek maid. "And I'm going to find them."
Monday, January 28, 2008
From around the web: The Four Star/Diamond Rating Losing All Meaning
The Four Star/Diamond Rating Losing All Meaning
By Glenn Haussman
There’s something screwy with the Four Star and Four Diamond designation. And the more I travel the more I fear for this gold standard’s relevancy.
While I respect what AAA and Mobil have done in regards to rating hotels so consumers can get a sense of what to expect at a hotel, I worry that this particular rating level has lost all meaning whatsoever.
It’s not necessarily these organizations’ fault, but the business of hospitality has changed wildly during the past 20 years. It’s time for a change.
The definition of what a four star property is must be clarified. In my opinion the swing between hotels that just squeaked by to achieve this rating is so far removed by those at the top end of the scale, it’s rendered the entire designation meaningless.
Here’s my beef. During this last year I have been fortunate to have stayed in many of these properties. While some were absolutely luxurious, some were so laughably bad I’ve become perplexed as to how these properties all received the same designation. It’s effectively putting this wide spectrum of hotels on the same level in the collective consumer mindset.
It’s not fair to the owners and staff of the properties that have worked extra hard to achieve four Star/Diamond status, and its not good for the Mobil and AAA brand names either.
During the last few weeks I experienced both sides of this rating dilemma. Recently I was a featured speaker at a conference – ironically the topic was luxury hotels. When I arrived at the hotel I was greeted by a wall full of plaques showing the designation from the last seven years. I was filled with a sense of relief; that is until I got to the hotel room.
The beds were atrocious; pillows were just quarter inch thick foam, linens rough to the touch. There was a balcony, but with cheap white plastic chairs that had started to discolor with age. The television was undersized and bathroom amenities were pitiful.
Even worse, service was abysmal. Throughout my stay, staff refused to make eye contact. But the topper was that I had an internet connectivity problem that sent me on a whirlwind of disgust as I tried to get my issue solved. Staff refused to handle the situation properly. I must have spoken to 10 people over a three hour period before they realized I was not going to let this issue drop. No one took ownership of the problem. They even refused to tell me the name of the general manager or connect me to his office. This property and the GM should be ashamed of themselves.
Additionally, the food was laughably bad and the décor went out of style sometime around Crocket and Tubbs were at the top of the Neilson ratings.
Oh yeah, the hotel’s staff also neglected to tell me a commercial was filming right outside my room. I got the pleasure of having stadium sized lights directed right on my room past 11 PM. On a Friday night. Real nice. Great customer service. Thanks.
Then there’s the flip side. This other hotel was the ultimate in upper upscale accommodations. Marble was everywhere and it was impeccably clean. Here I found spacious bathrooms, amazing bedding, linens and oversized fluffy towels. There were three – that’s right, three – flat panel televisions including a 17” model in the bathroom. Additionally, the internet connection was blazing fast and the staff was amazing. Every single employee I came into contact with looked at me and said hello. Many asked if I needed anything. Housekeepers were chatty and everyone was extremely polite. The food was impeccable too.
So how exactly is it fair that both these hotels have exactly the same rating? It simply doesn’t make any sense no matter how you parse it.
It’s time for a radical change. Here’s what I propose: Split the four Star/Diamond rating into two categories. Keep lower end properties at four, but push the rest to five. Then add a sixth level and put all today’s five Star/Diamond hotels into the new category.
This will not only eliminate confusion at the four Star/Diamond level, but finally give those at the top end of the market the sixth Star/Diamond they have been craving and crowing about for some time.
Let me know what you think. Am I onto something here? Or am I once again off my rocker? Drop me a line and let me know.
By Glenn Haussman
There’s something screwy with the Four Star and Four Diamond designation. And the more I travel the more I fear for this gold standard’s relevancy.
While I respect what AAA and Mobil have done in regards to rating hotels so consumers can get a sense of what to expect at a hotel, I worry that this particular rating level has lost all meaning whatsoever.
It’s not necessarily these organizations’ fault, but the business of hospitality has changed wildly during the past 20 years. It’s time for a change.
The definition of what a four star property is must be clarified. In my opinion the swing between hotels that just squeaked by to achieve this rating is so far removed by those at the top end of the scale, it’s rendered the entire designation meaningless.
Here’s my beef. During this last year I have been fortunate to have stayed in many of these properties. While some were absolutely luxurious, some were so laughably bad I’ve become perplexed as to how these properties all received the same designation. It’s effectively putting this wide spectrum of hotels on the same level in the collective consumer mindset.
It’s not fair to the owners and staff of the properties that have worked extra hard to achieve four Star/Diamond status, and its not good for the Mobil and AAA brand names either.
During the last few weeks I experienced both sides of this rating dilemma. Recently I was a featured speaker at a conference – ironically the topic was luxury hotels. When I arrived at the hotel I was greeted by a wall full of plaques showing the designation from the last seven years. I was filled with a sense of relief; that is until I got to the hotel room.
The beds were atrocious; pillows were just quarter inch thick foam, linens rough to the touch. There was a balcony, but with cheap white plastic chairs that had started to discolor with age. The television was undersized and bathroom amenities were pitiful.
Even worse, service was abysmal. Throughout my stay, staff refused to make eye contact. But the topper was that I had an internet connectivity problem that sent me on a whirlwind of disgust as I tried to get my issue solved. Staff refused to handle the situation properly. I must have spoken to 10 people over a three hour period before they realized I was not going to let this issue drop. No one took ownership of the problem. They even refused to tell me the name of the general manager or connect me to his office. This property and the GM should be ashamed of themselves.
Additionally, the food was laughably bad and the décor went out of style sometime around Crocket and Tubbs were at the top of the Neilson ratings.
Oh yeah, the hotel’s staff also neglected to tell me a commercial was filming right outside my room. I got the pleasure of having stadium sized lights directed right on my room past 11 PM. On a Friday night. Real nice. Great customer service. Thanks.
Then there’s the flip side. This other hotel was the ultimate in upper upscale accommodations. Marble was everywhere and it was impeccably clean. Here I found spacious bathrooms, amazing bedding, linens and oversized fluffy towels. There were three – that’s right, three – flat panel televisions including a 17” model in the bathroom. Additionally, the internet connection was blazing fast and the staff was amazing. Every single employee I came into contact with looked at me and said hello. Many asked if I needed anything. Housekeepers were chatty and everyone was extremely polite. The food was impeccable too.
So how exactly is it fair that both these hotels have exactly the same rating? It simply doesn’t make any sense no matter how you parse it.
It’s time for a radical change. Here’s what I propose: Split the four Star/Diamond rating into two categories. Keep lower end properties at four, but push the rest to five. Then add a sixth level and put all today’s five Star/Diamond hotels into the new category.
This will not only eliminate confusion at the four Star/Diamond level, but finally give those at the top end of the market the sixth Star/Diamond they have been craving and crowing about for some time.
Let me know what you think. Am I onto something here? Or am I once again off my rocker? Drop me a line and let me know.
Friday, January 04, 2008
From around the web: 2007’s Best and Worst Public Toilets
From luxury loos to crappy crappers, Where’s the Toilet? reveals its best and worst public toilet experiences of 2007.
read more | digg story
read more | digg story
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