Japanese wave after modeling the latest styles of adult diapers during a show in Tokyo Thursday Sept. 25, 2008. The show was organized to display the latest styles of adult diapers and to raise awareness of some of the issues facing the county’s rapidly aging population. (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder)
I found this photo on Open Salon and thought it fit to use as an illustration of what I find one of the worst hotel amenities: plastic under-sheets.
Whenever I enter a hotel room, the first thing I check is the bed. Does the hotelier in question – like many of his colleagues – believe I’m incontinent and need to wear an adult diaper? If I find plastic under-sheets, I take them away and ask for extra towels to put there.
I hate plastic under sheets! They are soo uncomfortable. And you know what? Al matters hoteliers believe can be solved by them, can be solved by double cotton under-sheets, or maybe more correctly put a mattress pad. Much more comfy!
What do you think?
Yesterday I got an e-mail from a very dear long time friend who invited me for a male only drink between 6.00 pm and 7.30 pm to celebrate his birthday.
I went. There he was. Gray hair and thin to the bone.
We hadn’t been able to catch up for a couple of years while he was being run over legally by the company he used to work for together with the help of a Dutch prosecutor. All legal battles finally lost. The whole story is worse than Kafka. What happened with him proves to me to that Dutch government changed the law after 9/11 too far. Through these changes the Dutch legal system is becoming very much alike the legal system of a Banana Republic. What happened to him basically can happen to everyone.
Lost top job, wife and all possessions.
A Dutch chef of fame lent him his bar for the venue. With a couple of bottles from the supermarket and home made snacks he was able to entertain the friends who didn’t turn their back to him.
Kudos to the Chef who gave him back some of his dignity by this gesture.
In a Press Release dated April 9, 2009 Hotelicopter is presented as a “New” Totally Awesome Hotel Search Engine after “The Hotelicopter had attracted wide media coverage with its April Fools Prank”
Almost everybody in Bloggistan loves the way Hotelicopter was launched as an April Fools prank and then turns out as a hotel booking engine. “Good marketing” they say. I beg to differ.
Although I can appreciate a good joke or to be fooled and certainly can laugh about myself, I feel fooled by Vibe Agent in another way:
First the search engine is not at all new. Basically it is the same search engine as it was three days ago under the name VibeAgent.
Secondly I have been involved as a very active “beta tester” in the building of VibeAgent. I’ve posted two posts about it here and here and referred to it in many other posts.
I wrote:
It is meant to be a community that shares hotel reviews on the one hand and combines that with best price searching on the other hand.
The members are called Agents. They write the reviews. They are unpaid.
VibeAgent has teamed up with an impressive list of travel and hotel portals at the back end, like Price Line, Booking.com and many others.
So: It started out as a community driven hotel search engine. As a sort of mini Tripadvisor, but a bit more advanced. In the meantime Tripadvisor has overhauled its website entirely and became part of Expedia.
Now with this repackaging of the site as Hotelicopter VibeAgent has wiped away its entire own community.
Where are your approximately 5,000 plus Agents, Adam?
Was that part of the deal with TripAdvisor? You being able to show Tripadvisor reviews provided you did away with your own base of hotel reviews?
I’m not amused and I believe many with me.
Update April 9 16.00 hr (04.00PM) local time:
Again this is a matter of lack of communication: See the comments below. Feeling a bit better now.
RandstadRail is a light rail initiative to have quick public transport between the two cities The Hague and Rotterdam. The idea is RandstadRail can use both the tram rail and the train rail network. The only problem is that they are much wider and heavier than ordinary trams. A fact that the The Hague Municipality played down heavily when we organized a protest when the City planned to have RandstadRail driving through our very narrow part of the Laan Meerdervoort in The Hague. Then they claimed our protests were mere NIMBY (“Not In My Back Yard”) protests.
My main complaint is that our part of the long Laan Van Meerdervoort is too narrow for Randstadrail.
What happened yesterday evening proved me right again:
RandstadRail crashes two taxis in one
A TV crew was shooting an interview with a foreign Prince in our small luxe hotel, Haagsche Suites, for a BBC series to be broad casted in spring 2009.
After the shooting I had ordered two taxis, one for the Prince and one for the crew. We had just loaded the crew’s gear, cameras, lighting equipment and tripods in the first taxi. We were saying good bye to the party on the sidewalk. All of a sudden we heard two enormous bangs: RandstadRail had crashed into the second taxi with such speed that the second taxi was smacked at least 5 meter further against taxi number one.
The poor driver of the second taxi in dire need of a replacement car.
I am very glad nobody was standing between the two taxis when it happened and luckily there were no personal injuries. This is not the first time this happens in front of our hotel. A couple of weeks ago RandstadRail crashed a car with a whole family inside it….not sure they didn’t have any whiplash injury then.
Now I really can say I am “Royally” Fed up with RandstadRail!
After three conferences with dedicated sites, the initiators of Tips from the T-List decided to start a more permanent site.
The site and its lay out need urgent attention imo!
- My main complaint is that the RSS feeds don’t work as they should: During a certain period of time they produced duplicate content. That has been taken care of in the meantime. The feeds are intentionally delayed. However to me it seems that the feeds are not added automatically with a delay of one or two days, while I believe they should. The time lag is so big the Blog loses momentum.
- Contributers to the site should be able to withdraw posts they deem less suited to publish over at Tips from the T-List.
- Contributers to the site should be able to edit posts. I understand the need of some over all editing of the site, but it is clear from looking at the site for some time now that the editors have very little time available for the editing;
- The navigation of the site needs attention, because it is not easy to wade through. I don’t like the difference between tabs and categories. Throughout the site there is no consistency.
All in all Tips From The T-List doesn’t take off as it should. Presently there are only 30 some travel related bloggers putting together their content. WiWiH has travel blogging as a lesser priority than its other activities and therefore was not chosen to act as a platform for the Tips from the T-List posse. Nevertheless WiWiH performs far better better imo. It gives you a clear overview of some travel blogging.The new startup Alltop’s Travel Alltop with currently 81 Blogs featured even gives a far better overview.
The income from the site
The initiators have announced that all income from the site goes to a good cause. I am glad they announced that. No fear anymore that they will earn some Adsense cents over my content. However I was not asked neither informed on beforehand that they would open up the site for advertising. Maybe I don’t like advertising at all….
The various agendas from Travel Bloggers
During ITB Berlin Bloggers summit it became apparent to me that the initiators of Tips From The T-List have their own limited area of interest, which is internet marketing for travel. I have a feeling that their main aim is to convince travel providers that they should listen to and engage travel bloggers as a marketing tool. There is nothing against that idea, but I am afraid that when one looks at the huge reservoir of thousands of Travel Bloggers, they forget they could make a far bigger Travel Community than Tips From the T-List is doing presently and consequently are losing big opportunities and huge momentum.
In my prior post I noted that Hotel Blogs Org, another Travel Bloggers aggregator presently seems to be hacked. I am sure the participants won’t like to be part of that. I wouldn’t. However Hotel Blogs seemed becoming a far better sharing tool than Tips From The T-List is at present.
Some Travel Bloggers don’t want to be part of Tips From The T-List because they are afraid they might jeopardize their Google ranking.
Some other Travel Bloggers don’t want to be part of Tips From The T-List, because direct competitors of them are behind the site.
It is my strong conviction that Blogging is sharing and not only sharing what you deem in your own commercial interest. I myself for instance have blogged about a fellow small hotel that blatantly had stolen the look and feel of the website of my own hotel. In another instance I have written about the opening of another hotel that is a direct competitor. A Blogger should be as impartial as possible without becoming impersonal.
Dear Friends can’t we finally bridge these gaps?
Finally we should reconsider its name: T-List
While every startup nowadays seems to reconsider its name, I suggest we reconsider T-List as a name for a posse of Travel Related Bloggers.
Create a Google alert for “T-list” and see what happens: All sorts of post are reported by Google:
Sh*t List
I don’t list
won’t list
didn’t list
can’t list
doesn’t list
weren’t’ list
All very negative.
Let’s go positive!
Maybe Travel Bloggers Posse could be a better name? Anybody a better idea?
Or should we just forget about the T-List and go on with TravelTwit.com solely?
Update May 20, 2008
In order to prevent confusion: Hotelblogs.org is not my site. I was checking it out and found this screen. Whatever it means this Turkish group wants to achieve. It seems the site owner is sound asleep. Also I wanted to share me finding Kwout which is a nice little thing to create screenshots and is now available as an add on for FireFox.
Latest update May 20, 2008
And they are back online fixed and all and only after one night’s sleep:-)
Fellow Travel Blogger Darren Cronian informs us in his Compulsory Fingerprinting to be introduced in UK Airports that soon to be opened Heathrow terminal 5 will have installed fingerprint taking machines and that more airports will follow suit.
Many of my posts are inspired by mere association. As soon as I saw Darren’s post I had to think of the photos I took this summer at 2007 The Hague Sculpture
Actually the sculpture of Lisa Roet, an artist of Down Under is not coined The Finger of Suspicion, but an earlier solo exposition of her.
Why the association?
It demonstrates a bit how I feel when I read such nonsense: Like a Caged Ape and that is a subject that intrigues Lisa Roet a lot.
Further investigations
If you Google on The Finger of Suspicion you get some interesting results:
- Once It was a song by Dicky Valentine. Very poetic and romantic
- J.F Kennedy used the phrase in a famous speech:
- Shelley Jofre reports on a series of disturbing cases that have revealed serious flaws with some fingerprint evidence in Britain, see BBC
- Within hours of the attacks in New York and Washington, the US and other western intelligence organizations put Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born terrorist in …the Guardian
Will it ever stop?
A proud member of the Press :-)
Yes I succeeded to get the press card and I am proudly showing it here as proof. It is my first, but definitely will not be my last. Maybe the idea of applying for a press card will inspire fellow Bloggers to do the same for other venues, fairs, or whatever.
I hopped over to Londen City Airport from Rotterdam with VLM. This was very convenient time wise and legroom wise.
I was lucky to have some dear friends who had a bed and a breakfast for me, but the route door to door from The Hague to Excel took the same time as the commuting to my friend’s address in a little suburb North West of London (half way to Luton).
During my tubing around in London it surprised me how many Londoners are leaving their papers and big paper coffee cups in the trains where cleaners collected them by the sacks full.
WTM has the same problem: Almost all food is offered in paper or carton and they produce tons of waste: An idea for WTM 2008: Back to porcelain and glass as reportedly green conscious organization?
More to follow.
Unpleasantness again?
Hey, your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Sometimes this is what I get if I try to connect with Facebook after some of my contacts on Facebook “did” something that cluttered my e-mail in box. Usually I find myself reacting only to one in ten e-mails, as each and every company out there seems to develop its own Facebook application.
Last week it was even worse….I got no unavailability message when I tried to log in. I simply weren’t getting access. Is it a glitch of my latest Firefox update maybe? No, I get the same result in IE. Is my IP blocked maybe? Possibly, as from another computer which uses another IP I get normal access. Very strange….Restarting my computer may have helped….Yes I do run anti virus software and anti trojan software and whatever…
The Banning policy of Facebook
This unpleasantness made me remember that an update on my post Happy Hotelier Banned from Facebook? was on the back burner.
I got some comments to that post.
Sean Scully a freelance writer in Philadelphia, USA, got the same treatment to his great annoyance. Unlike me he wasn’t re instated apparently.
The reverent Huffington post’s Ann Handley noticed Sean’s rant as as well as a similar rant from Harry Joiner of Marketing Headhunter who uploaded 4.600 contacts of his gmail addressbook (so invited by Facebook) with as a consequence a permanent ban without any warning.
You can find many similar rants between their comments.
When you Google on “Your account has been disabled by an administrator. Please contact disabled@facebook.com from your login email for more information” you get even more input on the subject from other Bloggers who got the same experience.
One of the funniest I think is this one: Faceless Book
So the conclusion is that you not only must not send the same text when you invite some friends. You also mustn’t invite too many friends at once.
Access denied to Facebook
The opposite of being banned by Facebook is being denied access to Facebook that many employees seem to encounter. The UK Telegraph names a few City Firms that ban employees from sites as Facebook: Credit Suisse and Dresdner Kleinwort , The Metropolitan Police, British Gas and Lloyds TSB.
According to the Blog Facebook Observer the latest news here is that many people in Iran are not able to get access to it.
Fatigue
Wisdump wrote about it.
Any human with the slightest sense of ratio will rather quickly be bored of (super)poking, foodfight and many similar applications. Sure, poking can be fun, but only for a rather short period of time.
I should have been warned for Facebook already: Esme at Pajama Entrepreneur did that in her post Why I’m not falling for the Facehook Hype…Curiously each of her posts has a button “share on Facebook”…
Esme pointed me to a post of Giga OM about Facebook Fatigue. His approach is this: If you want to connect you don’t want to attend a mega dance party where you cannot talk. Look in your mobile phone addresses: Those are the people you want to connect with. Whatever the people behind Facebook want to acchieve, ultimately they will find out that the hordes will move on from Facebook to another place where there are no masses already taking up all your time.
So, Why am I still on Facebook?
The reason is this: I managed to re establish an old contact with a distant cousin who I met 8 years ago when he lived in South Africa. Subsequently he moved to the UK and I lost contact, because I only had an e-mail address of him and several computers later I had lost it. Through Facebook we were able to re establish contact and he actually visited us traveling through The Netherlands and visiting various family members, because he is on the verge of going back to living in South Africa again. So that is a little plus for Facebook. I will hang in for some more time.
Is Fastpitch Networking an alternative?
If you look at their features as compared to Facebook, LinkedIn and Xing, you might say “Yes”, but for the moment I fear I will stay away from another time consuming experience. What is your take?
