Category: 101 Happy Hotelier

All you may want to know about Happy Hotelier and his blog

Nothing Wrong with Doing Nothing!

Lazy by Christoph |Nieman
Lazy by Christoph Nieman for the New York Times

After reviewing my 2007 resolutions for 2008 (and not keeping many of those), I decided on only one New Year’s resolution for 2008: Press the “publish” button of this Blog more often and quicker. Well thus far I didn’t keep even that simple resolution: Hahaha there are over 50 posts in “statu nascendi” (in simple English: in “Draft” status). I didn’t even bother to give predictions for 2008.

And then, yesterday, I came across this funny story: All Nothing, All the Time from The New York Times writer Neil Genzlinger, mainly a Theater, Film and Television reviewer. He describes five places where you can excel in doing nothing:

Why did I post this?

Firstly: it is a brilliant story.

Secondly: I was inspired by a couple of my own guests, who I just said “Bye Bye ” to after having seen them spending a romantic getaway…yes you guess…doing nothing: No laptop, no mobile phones, no blackberries, no PDA’s…They took their own Ipod and loads and loads of chips, cookies, marshes, M&M’s and other chocolate bars…They loved it…and so did I seeing them enjoy themselves.

Thirdly. This was not the first time we have hotel guests doing nothing. Moreover sometimes we go away from our hotel to do nothing just to recuperate from a period of hard working. However I never realized it can be a great art and also a great marketing tool/promotion. Why not promote your place as excellent for doing nothing?

And Finally: I believe Doing Nothing could become a huge trend in 2008.

There should be those B&B’s and Inns in Europe as well. Any suggestions from my dear readers?

Back from under the Rocks

Well not really under, but more on the rocks with a lot of snow:
We spent our annual holiday on the slopes of the Swiss Alps. Skiing away with nice fresh snow and gorgeous weather. I must admit I was on the verge of posting here. However, I chose to have some more quality time with the family. I even played some chess and started to remember some long forgotten openings and off course due to this rustiness lost a couple of games. I learned in the meantime of the sad early death of former World Champion Bobby Fisher who was a colorful chess player in his heydays.

The slopes were located in the vicinity of this old villa.

VC

It has an interesting history. Was built in the beginning of last century. Served as hotel for over 45 years, but has now another destination after an extensive renovation in the seventies.

I dare my readers to guess what the name of the villa is. Next week year more.

Happy Holidays from Happy Hotelier

Happy Holidays from Happy Hotelier

Happy Hotelier and DW for 35 years wish all his readers Happy Holidays!

Facebook Fatigue, Fastpitch Networking the answer?

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?

Fastpitch

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?

Happy Hotelier banned from Facebook?

Your account has been disabled by an administrator. Please contact disabled@facebook.com from your login email for more information.

That is the message I get on my login page after I have invited a couple of fellow members of the T-List group on Facebook (Facebook | T-List Group) as friends. I really don’t know what I did wrong. Did I invite too many fellow T-Listers in one session? If that is the case, it would be helpful if one got a warning in the inviting process, such as MyBlogLog does by simply indicating that you are linking to too many persons for the day after they had to limit the daily hooking up to a maximum of 20 because frequent hooking up generated too much traffic on their site. I didn’t keep count of the number of invites I sent, but it were maybe 12 or 15 invites, on a total number of group members of not more that 35 or 38 and several members are (or better said maybe “were”) on my Friends list already.

I have send an e-mail inquiry as suggested, even two, but am getting nothing else back than an automatic reply that they “are looking into it and will answer as soon as possible”.

Thereafter I noted several times that the site was not approachable. Are they facing capacity problems or are they maybe subject to a hackers attack and trying to plug the holes? I can imagine that, like credit card companies, Facebook has tons of information that hackers would drivel about. There are already some rumors in the Blog community that the information Facebook collects makes it very vulnerable for identity theft.

By this action Facebook has definitely sunken on my radar and on my list of possible platforms for building a T-List and a L-List Community. Isn’t that what communities are about: Linking with as much as possible people with the same passion?

Post Alia (added August 3, 2007)

Facebook reinstated me yesterday and explained that a Facebook user is not allowed to send the same text several times as such could be construed as spam…..that is exactly what I did with several invites. No warning was given, at least not noticed by me. The site was on and off, so maybe that caused the problem of not showing the warning. Sending several invites without text is not considered as spam. I still don’t get it…..