The Happier the Hotelier, The Happier the Guest
Yesterday the Kiwis lost a spinnaker (it literally blew up) and subsequently formed a Bra when hoisting the replacing spinnaker. So they lost their race. Today the Swiss won another race and are one win from winning the 32nd America’s Cup. Alinghi-Emirates 4-2.
I am glad, because I definitely would like to attend the 33rd edition IRL (In Real Life) and New Zealand is a bit far down under.
Amstelveen is a suburb of Amsterdam. It has the Cobra Museum, the only museum devoted to the Cobra Group of artists. Actually it should be spelled CoBrA, because its participants came from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam.
Corneille (Guillaume Corneille van Beverloo) is the only Cobra member still alive. Soon he’ll have the respectable age of 85. Here he is pictured with two of his paintings, Birds and Woman. As Corneille puts it: “They go perfectly together!”
This summer work of Corneille is exhibited under the title “Some of These Days” in the Cobra Museum.
After yesterday’s loss today, the Swiss managed to square the Kiwis with a win: 2-2 now and give us the closest America’s Cup match in many years!
Oops, I have changed my 404 template today [Ed: It has changed again since this post].
I was a member of Blogflux.
Blogflux is a combination of several things: A Blog directory that has organized and cataloged about 82,000 blogs by country and by topic (or tag if you whish). They have some Blog tools, among which mapstats that they have knitted together with Google Maps, a nice feature that I like. It enables you to see from where people land on your Blog. As a free member you can have a little bit of statistical analysis. In the pro version you can have some more statistical analysis.
You see from where the people look at your Blog by the position of the red blobs on the map and you see where they land on your Blog by clicking those little red blobs.
In my case you see for instance many clicks on the posts archived as number 211. When you wanted to know what post number 211 was about, you could click on the blob and were redirected to the actual post.
That was when I had my permalinks organized by date of the post and archive number of the post.
Unfortunately I could not relate each time archive numbers to individual posts unless I clicked them again.
Therefore I have changed my archiving method into date of the post and name of the post. Post 211 ) is now
http://happyhotelier.nl/2006/11/13/qbic-dutch-answer-to-easy-hotel-yotel-and-hotel-everland/. As Qbic is hot nowadays because of their recent opening and Yotel also because of their first pod hotel at Heathrow.
I found an alternative way of getting at the same post by post number which is very easy: http://happyhotelier.nl/?p=211
My older posts will remain organized in the old way, at least for a certain period, in certain search engines. People clicking trough from those search engine results are now landing on my 404 page. How stupid am I!
However I have decided to stick to this choice and apologize to all those landing on my 404 page.
I hope that the search engines gradually will find their way around this Blog when they re index this Blog and the error will fade out in the future.
We will see.
Update
As of november 2009 I have a plugin in place that enables you to redirect outside referrals to urls of your blog that are wrong because you have changed the way you archive posts. With the Google Webmaster help you can from time to time reapair errors. I have now redirected 211 to the actual post.
Last edited by Happy Hotelier on February 17, 2010 at 10:30 am
As usual, I have many items in mind to post about here. Frequently those subjects land on the back burner when a certain item asks for immediate attention. Today’s find is the Happines Project.
You will probably ask: “What is that about and why are you interested?”
To start with the last question:
My wife and I are in our fifth year of operating our very luxuriouse bed and breakfast. Before we started it, we both had a long working career in other areas. We get a lot of satisfaction out of it, because we have created something unusual where people talk about and where people even write about in glossy magazines, and where other people only dream about.
However our real satisfaction is that we are able to make our guests happy during their stay with us. We believe there is no better satisfaction for a hotelier than a happy guest. The name and tag line of this Blog are indeed very serious!
Me stumbling on this Blog of a lady lawyer, Gretchen Rubin who became a mom and a writer, made me realize this is an excellent resource and opportunity to make these hoteliers even happier (and so our guests)! I like to share that with you!
Gretchen blogs about her research of all things connected with happiness in:
A memoir about the year I spent test-driving every principle, tip, theory, and scientific study I could find, whether from Aristotle or St. Therese or Martin Seligman or Oprah. The Happiness Project will gather these rules for living and report on what works and what doesn’t. On this daily blog, I recount some of my adventures and insights as I grapple with the challenge of being happier.
One funny story is about her waitress friend:
A friend told me a story about the first summer she spent as a waitress.
Several times, she had tables of people who seemed really nice, with whom she had a great rapport, for whom she went the extra mile, and she’d think, “Wow, I’m going to get a great tip!â€
And she wouldn’t.
Other times, she had tables of people who seemed indifferent or grouchy, and she’d think, “Wow, they’re going to stiff me.â€
And they’d leave a generous tip.
She mentioned this observation to her manager. He said, “You’re only surprised because you’ve just started waitressing. You’ll see, almost always, people tip whatever they usually tip. They don’t tip more or less based on you and what you do.â€
This comment would have put the waitress much more in balance with herself.
Gretchen furthers it with the observation derived form Aristotle: “We are what we repeatedly do. It is a habit: A generous person makes a habit of generosity, a happy person makes a habit of happiness.” I couldn’t have put it better! And in addition my obeservation: A seemingly indifferent person can be nice and vice versa.
Enjoy further reading!