Category: Hoteliers

Confessions of a Hotelier: Two Brides – One (G)room…almost

2-brides-one-g-room

Our small luxurious 3 suites hotel is the Siamese twin of our own terraced townhouse. It’s front door is always closed and I always receive our guests personally. Sometimes I receive several just married couples after their wedding party in the middle of the night (early in the morning). Also this time…

Couple 1 had the key already, because they had stayed the night before their wedding.
Couple 2 had not arrived yet.
It was approx 02.15 AM
I had fallen asleep in my chair…watching some night movie.

My wife was in bed already and woke me up: “Darling, I believe they’ve arrived. I believe I hear something next door”
I listened and said “No, I don’t hear anything… not possible…they didn’t ring the doorbell…I would have known”

A few moments later:
“Ring Ring” the telephone. “Yes we are Couple 2 and, err, I’m now taking a bath, but we thought this is kind of strange, because we believed we would be welcomed personally and we didn’t see anybody”
Me: “I’m glad you called! Yes you are right it is our intention to always welcome everybody personally!..I have several things here ready for you” (champagne and sandwiches that I subsequently served to the room)…

Turned out Couple 1 had checked themselves in and left the front door ajar without them or me noticing and Couple 2 had thought there was an electric door opener. Luckily they had taken the correct suite ….

I Blog – Five Years Already!


I was too busy to notice it myself, but my first blog post dates back to June 5, 2004.

Rather than looking back in detail, which might be a bit boring, I’ve decided to finally complete the English translation and enhancement of my first ever power point presentation.

Ifitt had asked me for a presentation in Dutch for their Dutch day of Enter09, their annual conference. The 2009 edition was held in Amsterdam in January, 2009. The brief was to tell something about the do’s and don’ts by a blogging hotelier. Look for yourself:-)

Am curious to have your reactions:-)

Hotelier Ian Schrager into Chicago Ambassador East Hotel?

Ian Schrager

According to Chicago Business Ian Schrager is negotiating with the present owners to buy the 285-room Ambassador East with its “Pump Room” restaurant at 1301 N. State Pkwy in Chicago. Not really a “boutique” size property I would say. But comments are that he could be the man to re energize this 1926 built landmark hotel.

East Ambassador Chicago Pump Room Bar

Reportedly Peter Dumon and David Bossy, the present owners, have settled on a $25-million offer from Ian. Together with a former local partner they paid $44.5 million for the hotel in December 2005. What a sumptuous loss for a sumptuous hotel!

Am curious whether this acquisition will breath some new life in the Marriott – Schrager partnership named Edition Hotels that was announced with a lot of pomp in January, 2009 and not much in the news lately.

German Hotelier wants to sell his Hotel via an Internet Lottery

schwanen

According a short post of L’Tur German Hotelier for 17 years Reinhard Bairische of the Swan Hotel in Hettingen, has a creative idea to sell his hotel: He organizes a lottery via an internet site in Austria, as private lotteries are not permitted in Germany. He plans to sells up to 7,500 lottery tickets for Euro 99.- per ticket. If you want to have a small chance of getting a hotel in your name for a small amount. This is the way:-). Unfortunately there are no details yet as to where to buy the tickets. The Swan hotel dates back from the 15nd century and is located in the German town Hettingen, halfway between Stuttgart and the Swiss Bodensee.;

Wanna Become a Celebrity Hotelier?

The Happy "Celebrity Hotelier"
The Happy "Celebrity Hotelier"

3 ways of becoming a Celebrity Hotelier

  1. You have celebrities who become hoteliers – think Robert de Niro or Bill Gates-,
  2. You have hoteliers who become celebrities – think Andre Balazs or Paris Hilton (provided she can be considered a hotelier at all), and
  3. You have Incognito Hoteliers who host celebrities.

Thus far I belong to the third category.

Am I a celebrity Hotelier?

Recently @Jill Love; of Buy Cruises commented she would fancy me in a Smoking (Tuxedo if you whish, but Smoking is the French term that we use in here in the Netherlands as well), after I had confessed online that I’m a (cigarette) Smoking Hotelier.

Somewhere in my tweets with her I mentioned that I had to look after celebs in the hotel. Her comment inspired me to make this self portrait, when I had to attend a formal venue in Smoking (or Tuxedo if you wish) recently.

If Google says so

Then, totally by accident, I searched Google Images for Celebrity owned Hotels and Celebrity Hotelier and Celebrity Hoteliers and found my own face between the first images that came up and found other photos I published on this blog also showing between the first search results. Even photos that have nothing to do with these search terms.

It made me ask myself: “Do you wanna be a Celebrity Hotelier?”.

My answer to this question is: “No, not necessarily, I’m perfectly happy to remain an Incognito Hotelier catering celebrities, but it could be very well in the interest of Haagsche Suites to become a Celebrity Hotelier in order to attract even more celebrities and other fine guests.”

Testing my case

One and another made me put together this little SEO experiment to see whether it is possible to make Google believe that I’m a Celebrity Hotelier and make it a self fulfilling prophecy 🙂

PS: Today I repeated the search and my own face disappeared from the image search results, but still various and sometimes totally off topic photos from this blog are appearing high in the search results. We will see what happens.

Update May 26

The experiment seems to work: After some 6 hours Google had picked it up and upped my ranking for several search terms. The ranking differs per Google server (as usual). Now I’m uploading some well tagged photos to Flickr. See what will happen! It may be too much 🙂