Happy 2010, the start of a new decade!
A new web 2.0 social media hotel review project:
Amsterdam counts 350 hotels and Vincent Van Dijk starts his dedicated blog Amsterdam Slaapt (i.e. Amsterdam Sleeps). Each day of 2010 he will tell us about his adventures in one of those 350 hotels, as each day of 2010 he will be sleeping out of his suitcase in one.
As Vincent uses to live and work in The Hague I’m really curious what his experience will be. Especially as my slogan is always: You should party in Amsterdam, but you should sleep in The Hague!
Nevertheless it is an interesting initiative which I will be following closely as he seems to plan to be reporting in Dutch only.
Here is Victor’s first Tweet as @AmsterdamSlaapt
“On January 1, 2010 I’ll start start the hotel project Amsterdam Sleeps in
the stylish Parkhotel Amsterdam.
About Vincent van Dijk
Vincent van Dijk is a food and life style trend watcher and co owner of The Hague (Scheveningen) based ad agency HBMEO. He is a restaurant spotter for the Dutch Restaurant Guide SpecialBite err SpecialBite.com.
Sources in Dutch: Een jaar slapen in A’damse hotels – AT5 Nieuws and Misset Hotel.
We use Hoteliers.com, which is not a traditional OTA that charges commissions, but a site that offers what the traditional OTAs offer, but for a moderate annual service fee. If you make your reservation via the website of Haagsche Suites, it actually goes via their website. Together with maintaining availability in one place, it helps us tremendously to prevent overbooking.
Hoteliers.com has announced that they will be giving awards for the first time in 6 categories that their own guest reviews monitor:
Best Over all
1. In de Duinen, Callantsoog
2. B&B Fort Amsterdam, Amsterdam
3. Haagsche Suites, Den Haag
4. Misc Eatdrinksleep, Amsterdam
5. Parkhotel Horst, Horst
Beste Service
1. In de Duinen, Callantsoog
2. Misc Eatdrinksleep, Amsterdam
3. Asgard Hotel, Groningen
4. Haagsche Suites
5. B&B Fort Amsterdam
Best Location
1. Hotel Torenzicht, Amsterdam
2. Het Roode Lopen, Ermelo
3. The Dylan Amsterdam
4. Bilderberg Landgoed de Wilmersberg, de Lutte (Twente)
5. B&B Fort Amsterdam
Best value for money
1. B&B la Festa, Amsterdam
2. Holland Hotel liauckama State, Sexbierum (Friesland)
3. Hotel Manna, Nijmegen
4. Holland Hotel ?t Anker, Mierlo (Noord Brabant)
5. Misc Eatdrinksleep
Best comfort
1. Haagsche Suites
2. Texel Suites
3. B&B Fort Amsterdam
4. Misc Eatdrinksleep
5. Dorint Hotel Amsterdam Airport
Cleanest
1. B&B Fort Amsterdam
2. Haagsche Suites
3. B&B van Ostade, Amsterdam
4. Hotel Fita, Amsterdam
5. Herberg de Hondsrug, Eext (Drenthe)
It wasn’t until a fellow twittering hotel ( @CarltonTheHague thank you!) in the Hague congratulated us for the many nominations and reading about it on the Dutch Hospitality News site Horeca Entree who recently also decided to start with a Twitter presence as @HorecaEntree, until it finally registered in my mind.. busy as I was with guests..
Congratulations for all the fellow nominees, especially In de Duinen, Callantsoog and B&B Fort Amsterdam! I know what hard work goes with it!
I would like to thank all our guests for their support and taking the time to fill out the review forms. Also I would like to thank the very nice and always helpful people at Hoteliers.com for their continuous support and good work. Hm thinking about it, it is about time Hoteliers.com do establish their own Twitter presence:-)
Photo from Tripadvisor
Introduction
When I sat down to look back at 2008, I got so carried away that I decided to spread it over several posts, but that resulted in a period of 2008 not covered at all. This time I’ll try to be as concise as possible and cover the whole year in one post.
General observations
The depression – the photo a result from a Google search for photos “looking back to 2009″ seems apt – hit all of us full blow and various countries had to bail out major banks at the price of huge budget deficits that will haunt future generations.
Luckily our own hotel, Haagsche Suites, didn’t suffer as badly as I feared at the start of 2009. I believe there was a tendency to favor the smaller properties due to the crises. Occupancy and turnover were up when compared with 2008. So throughout the year I remained a Happy Hotelier.
That I was busy with the hotel also shows as I produced slightly less posts: 190 Up to and including this one (215 posts in 2008 and 166 in 2007).
What kept me busy:
- January: Preparations and delivery of a key note about blogging for the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism IFITT Amsterdam conference. I posted about the conference on January 27 and January 30.
- February: The first weekend I spent in Paris to celebrate my 60ieth birthday with my family. I have much more to tell about it than my two posts Retro Mobile and The Rediscovery of a Panhard Levassor X73.Twitter really took off in the Travel Bloggers world and brought them closer together. I mention:
I posted about the first Lonely Planet Travel Blog Awards and the Turkish Airlines 737 Crash in Amsterdam. Again Twitter was the first medium mentioning the crash.
- March: I prepared for, went to and wound down in part 1 , part 2 and part 3 from the T-List PhocusWright Blogger Summit in Berlin.
In the meantime I produced an posts about Lonely Planet Travel Blogging Awards, an update on the Twitchhiker experiment, my wine tasting society tasting a 1918 Vosne Romanee and one of my personal favorite posts I frequently look at : Some 20 Random Tips for Twittahholics
- April: A strong discussion about the use and ownership of a Twitter # Hashtag It was with respect to #winewednesday. After the discussion I lost a bit of interest, but shortly before it I had organized a Sparkling Wine Tasting #Tweetup in Haagsche Suites.
- May: Wanna Become a Celebrity Hotelier? was a post to see if I could plug the search term celebrity hotelier in the Google search ranking. It brought me into the Google top position for that search term very quickly and even today I keep that position, at least according to my location of the search.
Then there was the huge attention the Best Job in the World competition got .
I installed the Thesis Theme. That ended a period of multi WP theme blog here. It also took some of my time away from blogging.
- June: As I said: In June I was partly Lost under the Hood.
- July: A fellow travel blogger got a death threat what do you do with it?.
I took the position that Tripadvisor lures guests away from your site in order to send them to the big OTA’s.
Finally published my original Dutch IFITT presentation in the English Language in I blog – Five Years Already.
- August: Later in 2009 I met one of my regular readers who pointed to Confessions of a Hotelier – Two Brides – One (G)room…almost as his most favorite post of this blog. He happens to have first hand hotel experience in Haagsche Suites as one of our early grooms and with that remark gave me the final push to start a separate blog totally focused on Haagsche Suites only. It is in the works.
- September:
Tested Clipmarks extensively. See Testing Clipmarks.
Hosted a Carnival of Cities
- October: Ventured into food with Amazing Food Art – Dominique Davis and Goodbye Summer – It’s Halloween Time
- November: Participated in Wordcamp.NL.
Spent most of the month migrating two blogs to a new server….
- December: Attended the Dutch Bloggies Award Gala in The Hague and kept on struggling to get the two blogs up to date and right after the migration
Some UFO’s (UnFinished Objects) or AP’s (Abandonned Projects)
- I started a list of Twitter followers and intended to make it a huge list on a separate page, a project that I abandoned
- Many more subjects I didn’t post about as I would have liked, but I’ll keep them in my sleeve, rather than spelling them out for you.
Stay tuned!
Post Alia
[Oops and then it turns out I accidentally have hit the publish button again long before the post has some content at all. Sorry for the early onlookers. I've had the post on private viewing for some time at least until I had covered the first three months. I'll hopefully finish it tomorrow].
Last edited and finalized by Happy Hotelier on December 30, 2009 at 7.18 PM
Frequent readers of this blog know I like to play around with words and search engines. So I have tagged above photo “Nude Turkey”. BTW nothing so depressing as the view of a nude turkey :-)
We have some British subjects in the family and usually have visitors from across. Last year it was the same and off course turkey was on the Xmas menu. Last year’s turkey was excellent, but I forgot how I prepared it. Luckily one of last year’s guests remembered we had used Delia Smith’s guidelines and came up with a very helpful link How to roast turkey.
Then I realized I had forgotten to buy streaky bacon rashers. After inspection of the fridge I found some Coppa (Italian dried ham), even better than bacon I would think.
Next problem was the butter, that was much too hard to easily spread over the beast. So I found a roll of salted butter that I cut in parts and really buttered the turkey up!
The tricks are:
- Wrap it in aluminum foil, butter it up and cover it up with bacon (or coppa or whatever is alike)
- First 1/2 to 3/4 hour in the oven with high temperature (approx 220°C)
- Then 3 to 4 hrs at approx 170°C
- Finally you take the foil down and let it get crispy in 1/2 to 3/4 hr at approx 220°C again
The end result was fabulous again! Nice crispy and juicy! Thanks Delia. I wrote it into this blog to not forget your secrets next year.
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.
With all the snow of today and a just married couple stuck in our hotel because of the snow, I thought it an excellent moment to make my own Season’s Greeting Card for all my readers.
Merry Christmass and Happy New Year to you all
From the Garden of Haagsche Suites
Update: At 3.00 p.m. the couple was collected by one of their family members. Unfortunately their after wedding brunch had to be cancelled, but on Tuesday they will be heading for sunny South Africa. I envy them.
Last edited by Happy Hotelier on December 21, 2009 at 12:56 am
Those who follow this blog, know that I have spent quite some time with manually putting together top lists of travel bloggers according to Technorati in the past. The last one I published over a year ago on my TList page and for prior lists you can check out in my Tlist Category:
- The 300 of Halloween last year. which is also at the TList page
- The Update of January last year
- The update of December, 2007 ah but that post doesn’t give you a list itself…
- That of November, 2007
I did pray that someone would come up with a better measurement to replace my dumb work. Moreover at the time Technorati seemed too outdated and too infested with scrapers and sploggers and what all.
In June I discovered Frothy’s Alexa only ranking.
Then came Invesp. I mentioned it already back in July, that put several measurement methods in a basket and created its own list of Top Travel Blogs.
From time to time I checked those and had a good reason not to go further with my own cumbersome list making.
But now Technorati has really cleaned its act and rolled out a completely new approach in their Blog ranking. I have a feeling that they are moving in the same direction as Google search is moving. A nice way of reinventing yourself Technorati!
Oh, and before I forget: If you are looking for interesting Travel Blogs, do visit Tips from the TList and Travel Insights 100
Each ranking has its own pros and contras, but if you want to quickly orientate yourself about influential travelblogs you can have a look at both lists and make your pick, while I can concentrate on other content here:-)
I’m a passionate about people and always want to know more about people who interest me. Whenever possible, I try to connect in real life with the travel bloggers who I have met online already. So when I learned that Gary Arndt, the celebrity travel blogger of Everything Everywhere was passing through The Netherlands I jumped on the occasion and asked him to come along for a chat when time would permit. I had featured Gary already in my 10 Questions For” series in November of 2008 so from time to time we have online contact ever since.
The first photo proudly shows the result of this meeting: Gary in the garden of our little gem Haagsche Suites on July 3, 2009. The same garden that forms the logo of this blog. Off course asking attention for Haagsche Suites is one of the aims of this blog.
BTW Blogger Hopping is a term invented by Benji Lanyado.
Unfortunately we experienced a couple of Fails.
First Fail
At the time Gary was relying on his Ipod with WiFi connection to have contact with the outside world. Mostly through twitter. Much cheaper than the regular Iphone he has acquired since. So the meeting point was supposed to be a train station in The Hague. The problem being there are two important train stations in the Hague. Although I had tweeted to him that I was to pick him up at Den Haag HS – HS stands for Hollands Spoor from the time there were two separate railway companies serving The Hague – or Den Haag in Dutch- around 12.30, he apparently missed that tweet and didn’t show up. I waited about two hours hoping he would have an opportunity to connect via Twitter and I was checking my Blackberry every 5 minutes. After I had returned home he came trough on twitter as he had found some Internet café in the city. I collected him in the city. Clearly he had been waiting at the other station…Den Haag Centraal Station…all in all we lost 3 hours.
Second Fail
Clearly the second Fail is the fact that there is no free WiFi in the trains and neither in the train stations of the Netherlands. However, recently Dutch Government has announced that they will set aside funds to enable trains to have free WiFi in the Dutch trains.
Third, fourth and fifth Fail
- Two days before I had picked up my new camera, a Canon Eos 5D II that I had ordered to enable me to make a killer back up photoshoot of the great wedding of the daughter of dear friends in that weekend. Mighty proud I was to show it off to Gary. Off course I wanted to use it when Gary and I roamed The Hague. The day before I had already shot some photos on a flash card that came with the camera. Very unfortunately it appeared later that day that that flash card (white label) was not functioning correctly. Despite several trials and errors almost all photos of that second and third July went down the drain. Luckily I noticed it before the wedding
- Gary stayed overnight and obviously he Liked that part of his stay. Unfortunately I had to pull away for a formal dinner party that evening and had almost no time to chat with Gary as I would have liked. The next day I made up with a little Den Haag high lights tour
- Only recently some of the photos came up again, because I had written the recovered photos into an obscure map somewhere on my computer that I lost remembrance of during the busy summer months. Hence this post appears only now.
Sixth Fail: big annoying Thalys Fail
Gary was on his way to London and wanted to make the trip with Eurostar. The first leg of that trip goes with Thalys, a train between Amsterdam and Paris. He had to change train in Brussels South station. As of yesterday the Thalys does take a new route that skips The Hague entirely. Gary had somehow managed to book an Internet ticket through a European site of Eurostar. When I brought him to the station the ticket office there refused to change his voucher for a ticket, claiming they couldn’t do that because it was an (“Invalid?”) European ticket. How stupid and how embarrassed I felt about this. I talked with the train’s supervisor and pushed Gary into an earlier train that the one he was scheduled to take, because that was delayed and waiting for that could mean Gary missing the EuroStar from Brussels to London. Later I heard from Gary that he finally got his ticket in Brussels….
Later, In September I had a similar annoying experience with the Thalys. We had a group booking from Rotterdam, but I was not allowed to buy a separate leg from The Hague to Rotterdam, notwithstanding the fact that the Thalys then still stopped in the Hague. WiFi in the Thalys is horrible expensive and finally when the group entyered the Thalys in Rotterdam it appeared their booking system was totally belly up as our whole wagon had its seats double booked. It was for the calmness of the supervisor who patiently gave everybody a seat in another wagon that there was no row at all.
Well luckily we were not so unfortunate as the partridge taken by a Thalys of the photo in Paris:-)
Post Alia
These fails put a shadow over this meeting, but after all Gary and I will always have a good story to share and the longer ago the series of fails happen the more likely you are to have fun over it with and a good laugh…forgetting the aggravations.
This is a Dutch Mars Ad which says in Dutch – directly to Gary now-: nevertheless – “Twas fun, next time again?”
Last edited by Happy Hotelier on December 15, 2009 at 6:34 pm
The guy, Roelof de Vries of 360 Foto, who took the amazing dizzying 360 Degree shots from which I took this cutting was standing next to me when I was taking photos of the 2009 Dutch Bloggies Awards Gala.
Probably I was standing in his way while wondering about him using his tripod, until I saw the result over at the Dutch Bloggies site.
I had a special interest to go and see the Awards, because it was only 5 minutes away from where I live and work in The Hague. It was sponsored by The Hague. But most importantly my significant other blog Chair blog had made it into the final 5 from which the jury choose the winning blog in the category Art, Culture and Entertainment blogs of the Dutch Bloggies. I must admit this nerd was a bit excited albeit skeptical.
Here is the complete Awards List at Dutch Bloggies. I do hope they complete the short lists of all categories.
The Winner NRCNext.NL of the over all award choose this photo as their award portrait.
And my direct competitor and winner in the category Art, Culture and Entertainment blogs, Mick! choose several among which:
I’ve given priority to uploading my photo stream and have now to run to do some hotel duties before I can flesh out my observations.
In the meantime do head overt to my Flickr set 2009 Dutch Bloggies Awards in The Hague and please do help me people tag those Dutch Blogging Nerds.
More to follow!
Two Eurostar Trains by 
