The Happier the Hotelier, The Happier the Guest
A friend posted this memo on FB. Origin The Nutters Club NZ:
Dogs are welcome in this hotel!
We never had a dog that smoked in bed and set a fire to the blankets.
We never had a dog that stole our towels and played the T.V too loud or had a noisy fight with his travel companion.
We never had a dog that got drunk and broke up the furniture…
So if your dog can vouch for you, you’re welcome too!
From time to time images of this bookshelf with the 7 books of the world’s most important religions came along on my computer. It is a habit in many European hotels to have a Bible available.
I believe it is about time with the world shrinking and shrinking by all the traveling we do, to have the 7 religion books side to side available in every hotel room to enable us travelers to take notice of all these religions and to create more respect for each other.
Quote from Swell Future:
5,084,000,000 people, 5,360 pages, 3,700 years, 243 countries, 7 books, 1 shelf. For the first time, the world’s most influential religious texts are brought together and presented on the same level, their coexistence acknowledged and celebrated. JUXTAPOSED: Religion is the first in the Juxtaposed series of curated bookshelves.
Juxtaposed is an idea from the Dutch – American designers couple Mike and Maaike
What would you say?
Just by coincidence I noticed someone landing here via Jumeira Knowledge base
I already knew a lot is going on at High Syndicate, sister of WiWiH: Many Hoteliers use it as as a closed group repository. I assumed access only for the insiders of the big hotel chain in question and I had never imagined the wealth of knowledge available for the hotelier and how easy it is to navigate:
On the landing page you get :
and a
Then you have separate tabs for:
Knowing the two sites High Syndicate and WiWiH, I knew about all those functions and possibilities, but I had never seen them grouped together in such clever and easily navigable way.
It is not a loud screaming design.
I wonder how the hoteliers would do themselves, if they would apply the same simple principles for their own websites instead of those bleary screens with pop ups and a lot of clutter.
Guest Reviews do not only tell you something about the hotel, but also about the reviewer:
Apart from all, I was very interested to be able to quickly flip through their Tripadvisor guest reviews, because Jumeirah is the operator of the famous Dubai flagship hotel (7* they claim) Burj Al Arab. They get good reviews but amazingly also some very negative reviews and some that say more about the guest than about the Hotel. For Example:
i thought that one’s stay at the burj al arab would be rather splendid and i was extremely foolish to think so. as i arrived at the airport on first class from emirates we were taken by helicopter to the hotel. My gucci gown was ruined on the arrival and the sun was to bright so i had to close one’s eyes for much time when we arrived we were handed oil in our hands that wouldn’t come off for a while and our butler got in the way. the room was poor and the building and rooms bog standard. One would never go there again and would compare it to the dorchester hotel in london which is utterly ridiculous.never shall i set foot here again.
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Seems like a bogus report to me. The reviewer has no other reviews
I’ll start by saying the room and building itself are just an awesome site – don’t get me wrong. And just to say that I’ve stayed at the Burj Al Arab will be something that I really don’t ever anticipate knowing anyone else will be able to match in my group of friends. However, I was disappointed by some of the service provided. For the money paid – I was expecting to be wowed! The check-in was a bit of a cluster and the check-out was as well. In fact, the entire stay went to h#$% once we recieved our checkout bill. They have no real organized way to control the madness down at the entrance and they are trying to get people onto shuttles/taxi’s/incoming passengers/etc and you are in the middle of the maddness. The fitness center was lacking as well for such a nice place! It was nothing better than a hilton fitness center. All in all we don’t regret staying there – but we will never do it again – merely for the price.
An Hilton Aficionado who wanted to buy bragging rights, but found out he paid dearly. Which makes me think that this is an example of the Long Tail effect of a really loyal guest. If they stay somewhere else they will thumb it down!
My husband and I arrived at Al Qasr on 7th June and were to check-out and depart on 9 June from Al Qasr at Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai on an Emirates flight to Paris scheduled for 08:20hrs. In order to save time in the early morning before our scheduled departure from the hotel, we completed check-out formalities and settled our hotel bill just before midnight on 8 June 2008. We also requested a wake-up call at 05:00am the following morning as we had an Emirates limousine scheduled to pick us up from Al Qasr at 06:00am for our 08:20am flight (as we had already completed the online check-in procedure, we were required to arrive at the airport 90 mins before departure).
We promptly received our wake-up call from the hotel staff at 05:00am as requested and waited patiently in our room till 06:15am for a call from the hotel staff to announce the arrival of our pick-up and finally called Emirates to find out why the car had not yet arrived. We waited another 5 mins on the phone till the Emirates representative made inquiries about our scheduled pick-up and came back on the line to inform us that the limousine had in fact arrived at the hotel as scheduled at 06:00am and that the driver had also requested the concierge on duty to inform us of the arrival of our Emirates pick-up. Unfortunately, the concierge a gentleman by the name of Mr. Rauf refused to inform us about the arrival of the car and told the driver that he was not allowed to disturb his guests at that hour and therefore sent the driver away! The driver left the premises and reported the incident to Emirates airline, making sure to mention the name of Mr. Rauf for the record.
We immediately called Service One from our room to inform them of the incident and asked for Mr. Rauf to ask him why he had done such a ridiculous thing! As we were already late for our flight, I told Mr. Rauf to meet me downstairs. Upon meeting Mr. Rauf at the entrance of the hotel and demanding an explanation for his actions, we were treated with complete indifference and not even given an apology! We also asked how he could do such a thing when we had asked for a wake-up call from the hotel at 05:00am, to which he shrugged and mumbled something about not being able to trace the wake-up call. To make things worse, he did not even have the courtesy to arrange for a complementary airport transfer for us considering it was clearly his fault that the limousine had left without us. He asked the doorman to get us a taxi for the airport for which we ended up paying Dhs 95 upon reaching the airport.
Needless to say, the experience has been shocking and pathetic coming from a hotel of it’s repute and will prevent us from ever returning at any of the Jumeirah properties. The unprofessional behavior of Mr. Rauf indicates a serious deficiency in the training of the hotel personnel and even a lack of common-sense amongst it’s employees. I believe that if a prestigious hotel like Al Qasr is unable to meet such basic expectations of it’s guests (that even a 3-star property would definitely see to) it is simply not worthy of it’s reputation and definitely not worth paying big buck for!
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Poor Mr Rauf was a bit sleepy and didn’t want to disturb his guests. I have the feeling the guest in question is to blame as well. If time is of essence, I would check and double check and would certainly not wait as a lamb in my room, but at the front desk to wait for my driver. Secondly I wouldn’t waste time by telling Mr Rauf he was such a dumbass. I rather would request an immediate solution…..I believe the Hotel should politely but resolutely point that out. Probably the lady is still simply mad about her own mistakes.
Worth a closer look! I am wondering whether they will make it password protected after this post.
Update
And Yes! Soon after publication of this post, they put a relocation to Jumeirah’s main site in the High Syndicate landing page: Henri Roelings was watching me 🙂
Here are Happy Hotelier’s High Five (3) for:
About Happy Hotelier’s High Five
Happy Hotelier’s High Five is a meant as a gesture of appreciation to fellow Bloggers who blog about travel and are sometimes referred to as members of the “T-List” or other interesting Bloggers or Web Personalities.
The arms are usually extended into the air to form the “high” part, and the five fingers of each hand meet, making the “five”, hence the name, although Happy Hotelier’s High Five will always be a left handed one.
I will not publish it on a scheduled date. I will publish it each time when I have found five persons or sites or posts that I deem worthy a High Five. It even may imply me echoing old news here.
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About The High Five Logo
I borrowed the photo of a sculpture from Lisa Roet, a sculptor born in Australia and currently living and working in Melbourne, Australia, because one of the main items on my passport is that I miss a big chunk of my right thumb, so my right hand is much alike that of an ape:-)
Monet painted his Waterloo Bridge paintings during a stay in the London Savoy Hotel. This painting fetched a record at Christie’s of UK pnd 18 mio which is more than double the pre sale estimate.
From the Lot notes of Christie’s :
‘I adore London, it is a mass, an ensemble, and it is so simple. What I like most of all in London is the fog. How could English painters of the nineteenth century have painted its houses brick by brick? Those fellows painted bricks that they didn’t see, that they couldn’t see… I so love London! But I only like it in the winter… It is the fog that gives it its marvellous breadth. Its regular, massive blocks become grandiose in this mysterious cloak’ (Monet, quoted in J. House, ‘Visions of the Thames’, pp. 15-37, Monet’s London: Artists’ Reflections on the Thames 1859-1914, exh.cat., St. Petersburg, FL, 2005, p. 33).
When Monet arrived in London in 1899 for a family visit, he had not been to the British capital for some time. Checking into the relatively recently built Savoy Hotel, on the North bank of the Thames, he was amazed by the view, fascinated by the ever-shifting light effects on the river, and immediately embarked upon one of his most celebrated series of paintings, all showing essentially one of three motifs in London. These were the Houses of Parliament and, painted from his bedroom, Charing Cross Bridge and Waterloo Bridge. He focused more on the latter, as in Waterloo Bridge, temps couvert, perhaps enjoying the looping rhythm of the arches in comparison to the rigidity of the ever-right-angled Charing Cross Bridge. Another aspect that may have led to his preference of Waterloo Bridge as a theme was the fact that the sun, rising in the East, shone during the morning from behind it, providing an intriguing array of subtle light effects, a smog-bound chiaroscuro. It is a tribute to the visual power of Monet’s paintings of Waterloo Bridge that the majority are now in museum collections throughout the world, meaning that the appearance of Waterloo Bridge, temps couvert is a rarity, a factor that is emphasized by the sheer quality and beauty of this painting.
It was in order to see his son Michel, who was ostensibly in London to improve his English, that Monet arrived in 1899 with his wife Alice and his stepdaughter, Germaine Hosched̩. His immediate rapture on seeing the view from his room must have been to the chagrin of his family, for already during this stay he embarked upon the beginning of a campaign that would last half a decade. Canvas after canvas was used in order to capture the ever-changing view from his window, and the speed with which these view changed meant that he ended the first stay frustrated, and would returnРalone, and therefore presumably without the distractions of his familyРto the same hotel in 1900 and 1901.
