Category: Hoteliers

Istanbul and the art of booking a hotel online: Nothing Zen!

2007 September Art en Route in Istanbul CRW_2337A
I am starting this post at the end of 2006 because a journalist of the Guardian has asked me to give some insight comments about booking your travel via Internet. Well, what better answers to such question than to describe what you do on the Internet to get some answers while it is for real?

Once a year, in September, we use to travel with a very heterogeneous group of Baby Boomer friends to a city to experience Modern Art. The name of the loosely organized association is aptly chosen “Art en Route”. It even has its own logo. Art en Route has its own Small-Museum-of- Modern-Art-director who gives the group lessons in Modern Art and prepares briefs about places to visit and artists to see and acts as the Art guide in the city. He is very well humored and has to be, because the group often gives its cynical comments about the “Artsy” character of what is displayed. We (he and Art en Route members) learn a lot!

Earlier trips were to Barcelona, Berlin, Paris, and Venice. The Berlin and Venice trips I attended, The rest I had to forgo, as I had to look after our own hotel guests.

In 2007 we are to visit Istanbul for the Istanbul Art Biennale.

The frequent travelers of Art en Route and I -as the Hotelier and Internet geek- of Art en Route are asked for Hotel suggestions. After I had suggested Propeller Island City Lodge for our September 2006 trip to Berlin, I am afraid some members of the group will vote against any of my suggestions.

However, I should mention that I suggested this Hotel only after my DW called me up in the middle of the night when the trip went to Barcelona in a prior year (2004): She had just checked into the group’s hotel of choice and very much to her dissatisfaction. The room had only one window that looked out on a blind wall of an in-house light shaft and the pipes of the hotel kitchen and various air conditioners were blowing their air and stink with a lot of noise into the shaft. She demanded me to look for another hotel on the Internet immediately. Also the hotel was very shabby and located in the center of the ”Quartier Des Madames”. Hence she wanted to move out and check in into another hotel immediately. Apart from the fact that then it took even more effort to find a suitable hotel, I didn’t succeed to find any other hotel room at all for her, as Barcelona was fully booked, at least according to the consolidators and very few hotels had their availability accessible through their own sites in those days. Therefor I am always hesitant to book last minute, whatever the deal may be. Unfortunately on the other hand my DW and I are usually forced to book last minute by our work.

Internet is more about randomly than scientifically approaching such questions. Therefor I describe my rather random (in earlier years the buzz word would be fuzzy) approach while avoiding the Five Star Alliances of this world.

  • My first inclination is to go to the site of Bookings, already because, originally, it was set up by a couple of Dutchman and because it is a fast loading site and has a lot of useful content (good maps!) and added somewhere in 2005 or 2006 user generated hotel reviews to it. It comes up with 102 hotels in Istanbul….now where to start…..leave it for the moment. By the way: They changed their name into Booking.
  • Mr and Mrs Smith? I red somewhere (yes it was in The Guardian) that the couple behind the guides and the site got married very luxuriously. They have only the Sofa Hotel. I discussed this already with the lady in charge of booking for Art en Route, but it is probably a bit to far away from the city center.
  • Relais et Chateaux? Has no Istanbul Hotel presence.
  • Luxury Culture? No Istanbul Hotels.
  • The Kiwi collection comes up with the first useful hit that draws my attention: Sumahan on the Water on the board of the Bosporus, about half an hour from the city center by water taxi. I would love to stay at this place as I know where it is and know (because once I made a trip on board of the US Ambassador’s motor launch “Hiawatha” over the Bosporus) how beautiful the scenery is there and how you can be sensationally surprised if a Russian Mega Crude carrier comes along when you potter on the Bosporus in a relatively small motor boat. It is even more sensational than when from Rotterdam Centrum you want to visit Hotel New York in Rotterdam. The river Maas is very busy there with a lot of Big Barge traffic up and down the River.
    A drawback of the Kiwi Collection is that it lists few hotels and gives Istanbul and Marmara as location result: Marmara is approximately 100 miles apart from Istanbul, i am not searching for Marmara.
  • Then I look at Tripadvisor phew, 344 hotels…Again: Where to start…?
  • Once I got the tip for Travel Intelligence [ed: diascontinued since publishing this post] from a Dutch guy who takes 2 to 25 Euro cents from a respectable number of Chinese travelers pouring over Europe whereby he acts as an intermediary for booking them cheap hotel rooms. Probably he is wiser than I am. Hey! They revamped the Travel Intelligence site: Not so much faster loading, but definitely a better look and feel and a map! They also mention the Sumahan. It is probably a bit too expensive for the group. It is located in an old Raki distillery. That is interesting.
  • I turn to Expedia.com and see that a couple of hotels offer up to 25% early booking savings and other hotels have probably not set their availability correctly.
  • I am definitely avoiding the SPG (Starwood Preferred Guest) booking site as I recently found out that before you know how, you make a decently priced reservation but forfeit your up front payment if you want to change your date of booking or just made a simply made error in the booking.

A couple of hours went by. Now, like another Blogger, Heather Green at BusinessWeek put it eloquently recently: I should take a walk around the block to let my brain do something else than troll: surf and read and read without my brain taking anything in….on the other hand: I use to surf as an alternative way to walking around the block thinking about issues that come up in my work…

My first conclusion is: Look at various dedicated hotel sites, be it luxury, design, romance or whatever you have in mind and then check back with the bigger sites as Booking, Expedia and the like.

I look further:

My second conclusion is: First I should have called upon a friend of mine who is a big shot in business, has lived several years in Istanbul not so long ago and still frequently travels there….

Will be be continued somewhere in February, when we have Art en Route’s opening of the season session.

In the meantime I would appreciate suggestions from readers.

Update: Eventually we staid at a Hotel near the Kybele hotel which had a nice lobby for a drink.

Last edited by gje on December 17, 2016

Bill Gates: more of a Hotelier

The Canadian based Four Seasons Hotels Inc. that manages 73 Luxury Hotels in 30 countries is under a bid that values the company at a US $ 3,7 bio, from a Saudi Prince, Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud, currently according to Forbes the world’s eight richest person, through his Kingdom Hotels International, who teams up in this bid with the world’s first richest person, Bill Gates through his Cascade Investment LLC. They had already a 30% stake together for a number of years and will extent their interest to 90%, while the company’s founder, Isadore Sharp (75) will keep 10% of the shares.

Kingdom Hotels International took over another Luxury Canadian hotel group, Fairmont Hotels & Resorts which then was combined with the Raffles group already in January 2006 with a total transaction value of US $ 5,5 bio.

Lars Stroschen: The Artist who became a Hotelier

Recently, I stayed a couple of days in Propeller Island City Lodge in Berlin with a group of about 20 baby boomers.

It was a lot of fun having some members of the group remembering their backpacking and youth hostel days (waaay back!) as the down to earth design of the rooms forced some of us on their old knees to properly enter the bed which was sunken in the floor.

In a separate post I will address some of its features, but now first some attention for Lars, who is the originator and owner of the hotel and with whom I shook hands the day we departed. I asked him whether he liked it to be an hotelier: His answer was:”No, but I liked the making of it, and I have a very nice crew of 5 who attend our guests”.

I had the impression already as he roamed around as if being the ghost host of the hotel during breakfast hours. But indeed his crew is excellent and very friendly and they make the visit worthwhile!

Lars himself explained it as follows somewhere on his site:

Ever since childhood I have always enjoyed doing things that had something to do with sound and images. I had music lessons, started to draw, built my own furniture and took photos like mad. I could never settle for one particular discipline because I loved them all. Because technical innovations were also a great inspiration to me, I soon turned in the church organ for a synthesizer and later shifted from the pencil and the darkroom to computer art.

After school I studied Visual Communication at the Berlin Art College. In my spare time I worked as photographer and sound engineer. During my various travels at this time, I swapped my camera for a microphone and started to collect noises. This material formed the basis for my experimental music and sample-CD projects. My instrument collection grew to a full size, specialist electronic music studio. I then got a job as author of a radio series on electronic music. During these two years I created several compositions for demonstration purposes, several of which got released on CD.

The radio broadcasts also earned me a composition contract for a dance performance at the Berliner Schaubhne (Playhouse Theatre). I got my first recording contract with a Hamburg-based label and shortly afterwards another one in France. From this time onwards, all my projects were published under the name PROPELLER ISLAND. This pseudonym stems from a book written by Jules Verne at the end of the nineteenth century which describes an artificial island that travels with its inhabitants around the world – way ahead of its time! I chose this pseudonym mainly because it sounds good in German and English and because can refer to almost any kind of work – not just music.

Later I founded my own record label so as to be completely independent. Along with the many CDs with music and sound sculptures, I also published (as PROPELLER ISLAND) several sample CDs and CD-ROMs with unusual sound collections.

The only musical excursion without the aid of a ‘propeller’ was with the composer community TONART, which I joined along with other artists in order to publish avant-garde music. We dissolved the group after the fifth CD.

To fund my music projects and my studio, I turned two rooms in my flat into guest’s rooms. Because normal rooms it would have been far too boring, the first rooms of CITY LODGE were created.

The rooms quickly became very popular via the press, especially in England, and soon the letting out became so much work that I had almost no time left for my studio projects. I decided to enlarge the guest room business, thinking that I would be able to hire staff and therefore have more time for my studio. How naive! ….

An old pension hotel in the same building seemed perfect for the expansion. I was lucky, the lease had just run out and it was up for sale. It took over five years to complete PROPELLER ISLAND. During that time I designed hundreds of interior elements, objects, and pictures and drew up new concepts. As a ‘non-hotelier’, I had to learn to think about safety regulations for guests and also convince authorities of the practicality of my fantasy interiors.
It was a long hard road that makes me even more proud of my giant work of art, since so many doubted that I would ever manage to make it work. It is attracting art lovers from all over the worlds- even ‘proper’ architects and ‘proper’ hoteliers! :-))

The only problem is that I still haven’t managed to make enough time for the music – and that is what I wanted to achieve in the first place, didn’t I? … Oh well, c’est la vie!

Lars Stroschen, Summer 2004

Fawlty Towers refurbished and reopened by Sybil

Sybil in Austin 1100 reopens Fawlty Towers

A Devon hotel, Hotel Gleneagles in Torquay, which inspired the legendary TV comedy series Fawlty Towers has been officially re-opened by one of the show’s stars.

Prunella Scales (who played Sybil Fawlty) has officially re-opened Hotel Gleneagles after arriving in a replica of the red Austin 1100 car, which, in one of the series’ most famous scenes in 1975, Basil gave a good hiding with a branch when it conked out and wouldn’t restart.

The reopening followed a major refurbishment. The hotel was recently bought by local businessmen Brian Shone and Terry Taylor. They have spent £1 million on refurbishing the facilities, and Prunella Scales was guest of honour at the official relaunch on 18th September 2006.

Fawlty Towers was based on the Gleneagles, where John Cleese stayed with other members of the Monty Python team in the early ’70s. Cleese, who of course played Basil Fawlty, based the character on the owner of the hotel, Donald Sinclair, who he described as “the most wonderfully rude man I have ever met.”

Mr Sinclair, who died in 1981, is said to have thrown Eric Idle’s suitcase out of the window “in case it contained a bomb” and complained about Terry Gilliam’s table manners.

Looking back, the real Sybil, Beatrice Sinclair, agrees her husband was not good with the guests. “Not really, he was a commander in the Royal Navy and he liked to have the last word. I don’t think he ever really enjoyed the hotel life.”

The Gleneagles was not the location where the series was filmed. That was done in Thames Valley. The hotel shown in the series was the Woodburn Grange Country Club in Buckinghamshire, but that burned down in 1991.

Fawlty Towers

By comparing the two photo’s you can see that Prunella didn’t age at all!

Only 12 episodes were made of Fawlty Towers, and they were first aired on BBC1 more than 30 years ago.

But the legend of Basil and Sybil lives on…

With thanks to: »BBC

Hot Hotelier News

Um, just a few days after I launched Happy Hotelier Juliana Shallcross, Hotelchatter’s senior editor, launches another nice alliterative tag Hot Hotelier News with an on and off love story about NY Hot Hotelier Andre Balazs and star Uma Thurman who “burn it up again”:

Today we introduce a new feature called Hot Hotelier News where we keep you posted on the work, life and love interests of our favorite hoteliers. This week, we will do one a day. After that, we’ll scale back to one or two a week if we can restrain ourselves. Enjoy.

On and off happiness?

Who will start Hobby Hotelier, my first thought?