The Happier the Hotelier, The Happier the Guest
Back to Luxury Hotels:
Quinta Real Hotels is a chain of presently 9 luxury hotels. For me the Bullring turned into an all suite hotel in Zacatecas in the province of Zacatecas with 36 Master suites, 13 Grand Class suites and 1 presidential suite is a true boutique hotel. I have put it on my wish list.
This weekend the London Trafalgar Hotel served as podium for Bridge Art Fair, a Chicago-based arts programming organization Bridge, NFP which organizes annual Bridge Art Fairs in Chicago, Miami and London.
As Part of The Bridge Art Fair Capla Kesting featured Iraq War Memorial: Death of Prince Harry.
by Daniel Edwards, well known for controversial sculptures, which include a nude, autopsied Paris Hilton, a graphic interpretation of Britney Spears giving birth and “Fidel Castro’s Deathbed Portraitâ€.
The Capla Kesting Press release explains it as follows:
LONDON, England – A war-mutilated Prince Harry is the symbolic fallen hero in a memorial honoring those willing but unable to serve in the Iraq conflict. Harry, brother to Britain’s future king, was poised to be the most celebrated soldier of the Coalition forces, but due to the “specific threats to kill or kidnap him,†he was kept home. However, Prince Harry will be remembered for his intended tour of duty in a memorial to be unveiled at the Trafalgar Hotel October 11th courtesy of Bridge Art Fair.
“Iraq War Memorial featuring the Death of Prince Harry, the Martyr of Maysan Province†draws inspiration from Harry’s willingness to sacrifice for his country, and the sympathy for his disappointment of an unfulfilled patriotic aspiration.
“This war memorial is dedicated to the brave at heart,†said spokesman David Kesting. “But the brave men and women Prince Harry inspired to enlist for combat following his announcement to serve six months in Iraq are not forgotten.â€
The Memorial features Prince Harry laid out before the Union Jack with pennies placed over his eyes and head rested on the Bible. The statue suggests the tragic outcome of a confrontation in Iraq’s Maysan Province with the Iranian weapons smugglers for whom Harry’s tank regiment was scheduled to patrol. Prone with his unfired gun still holstered, Prince Harry is represented clutching a bloodied flag of Wales, and holding to his heart a cameo locket of his late mother, Princess Diana, while a desert vulture perches on his boot. Harry’s head is earless, denoting the explicit threats against the Prince from militia leaders saying they planned to send him back to his grandmother “without his ears.”
A bronze casting of Prince Harry’s “severed ears†also set for display at the Trafalgar Hotel will be offered on eBay.
Harry had stated he would leave the army if he was left in safety while his regiment was sent to a war zone. “Prince Harry’s spirit must have died the day they told him he couldn’t serve,†speculates New York artist Daniel Edwards. “That’s what this memorial is about.â€
Like Paris’s Victor Noir Memorial, security for the Prince Harry Memorial will guard against vandalism from expected throngs of admirers believing luck in love and fertility may come by kissing the lips of the memorial to England’s reputed playboy “pinup prince.â€
They even set up a website: Prince Harry memorial
There they claim the visitors comments were much more positive than the Press and the reactions on Internet:
The opening for the public was great. For all the negative press that we got and brandishing on the website NO ONE MADE A NEGATIVE COMMENT. Actually it was quite the opposite of what was said about it online. People responded very positively to the work. Remarking on the various details of the piece, like the locket, the holstered gun, the roses in his helmet and pound coins on his eyes. I think we had close to 500 visitors and no one had a negative thing to say. People really enjoyed the work and made numerous positive remarks commenting on their stance regarding the war, pubic service and the royal family.
The website features a picture of the London Towncrier who reportedly was responsible for announcing Harry’s birth:
I believe it is a great eye opener and reflection on present times.
What do you think?
My Blogger friend Albert Barra pointed me to El Blog de un Hotel ie A Hotel’s Blog. [ed: since the opening of the hotel the Blog has been discontinued and removed]
Not that I am able to read or write Spanish, but with the help of Google Translate (Beta) I can at least assume I know a bit about what El Blog de un Hotel is posting about.
I like the concept: The Hotel talks to the reader while being built and is meandering in its posts the same sort of way I am meandering myself in this Blog. It keeps its name and brand and location secret. It will be located in Spain and will open 365 days after the Blog started. As the Blog started September 25, 2007, the hotel will open in September 2008.
The last post shows us interesting Artist Impressions of the mystery hotel’s design like this:
It features two clever ways of building traffic:
Both may create their own buzz, or maybe even hype….
I will follow the developments with interest.
Last edit August 2009:
Alas the Hotel is the Madrid Eurostar, but it appears the blog has been wiped.
The landing page says: Translated via Google:
Blog of a Hotel
Hola a todos.
Hello everyone.Como sabéis ya soy una realidad. As you know I’m already a reality. El pasado 9 de enero abrí mis puertas para empezar a recibir huéspedes. On January 9 I opened my door to start receiving guests. De momento todo va muy bien, pero estoy desbordado de trabajo: coordinando los montajes de las habitaciones, controlando la calidad de mis desayunos, poniendo a punto mi Well Health Club y dando una cálida bienvenida a todos los que ya han querido conocerme.
At the moment everything is going very well, but I am overwhelmed by work: coordinating the assembly of the rooms, checking the quality of my breakfast, my point being Well Health Club and giving a warm welcome to all who wanted to know.Por todo ello, y lamentablemente, me será imposible seguir manteniendo activa esta bitácora . Therefore, unfortunately, I will be impossible to keep this blog active. Hemos compartido mucho juntos, he aprendido un montón de vuestros comentarios y espero que, a lo largo de este año vosotros también hayáis disfrutado con mis comentarios y descubriendo mis interioridades.
We shared a lot together, I learned a lot from your comments and hope that throughout this year you also you have enjoyed my comments and finding out my insides.Ya se ha empezado a contactar a los ganadores de los diferentes premios, pero si estáis impacientes, podéis enviar un email a.
Has already begun to contact the winners of the awards, but if you’re impatient, you can send an email to emailComo dicen los humanos, esto no es un adiós sino un hasta pronto.
As the human, this is not a goodbye but a see you soon.
…It was a very nice and creative example of marketing via a blog… I am really surprised they simply threw away all the good work…
Recently the Dutch Hotel Search engine Hoteltip! was launched.
Like a sort of crawler the site looks for hotel rooms at various portals/bookings engines. It claims to return the cheapest rates. All depends on the portals they signed up off course, but in the process you can see which sites they crawl.
It was featured on Killer Startups, also a cool idea.
I just returned from a week’s trip to Istanbul with a group of 26 and a lot of information to share with you.
Trip and organization
First I would like to address the actual travel details.
We flew with KLM (a flight shared with KLM’s partner NW) directly from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport to Istanbul Attaturk Airport without any delay.The fact that KLM is now a subsidiary of Air France apparently did something good to KLM: Flying in time. Flight attendants who behave much more gracious and hospitable and even the food simple, but better than I remember from years ago, when I used to fly business class and decided not to fly KLM anymore due to exorbitant rates, very unfriendly flight attendants, and horrible food and had handed my frequent flier card in. Kudos for KLM!
The trip was partly booked through a Travel Agent No Beach. They also did a wonderful job in getting the group transferred by private couch from and to the airport, provided two nice guides fro some sightseeing, fully bilingual in Turkish and Dutch (to be more precise: one was speaking with a Flemish tongue, the Belgian version of Dutch). They organized some intermediate transport by coach and ferry to a nice restaurant at the Asian side of the Bosphorus and finally the transfer back to the airport. They made the hotel reservations solved some issues arising from an an overbooked hotel. All in all very conveniently organized. Once more the experience convinced me that for a group you should rely on an experienced travel agent and not on your own time consuming Internet rummaging and the hassle of negotiating with hotels you don’t know. Kudos for No Beach!
Hotels
As the frequent reader may remember from the two previous posts in this series, Part 1 in January and Part 2 in April, we had arrived at a shortlist of a couple of hotels:
It turned out that part of the group stayed a couple of days in Lady Diana and I would suggest that as the hotel to stay in when you like to be in the old center and in the walking vicinity of several of Istanbul’s highlights, several good restaurants and in the vicinity of a very easy cross city tram by which you can avoid the car congestions you will face when taking a taxi (apart from the fact that almost every taxi driver tries to make enormous detours to jinn up his bill).
I myself stayed in The Celal Sultan Hotel fro the whole week. The owner lives in Belgium (hence the Dutch spoken) and the hotel has being decorated by a Belgian interior decorator. This is a very nice hotel, very nice staff, good service and good amenities, a cozy lounge and two nice roof terraces with view on the Aya Sophia, but we stayed in a standard room which is more the size of a room in a Pod Hotel than of a decent hotel room, which is a bit too much if you are used to 75 sqm suites in your own hotel. Their superior rooms have the usual 4 star size and are acceptable.
The main reason for my verdict in favor of the Lady Diana is that their roof terrace is much more spacious and spectacular than that of the Celal Sultan with a far better view over the city, the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara with the possibility to have breakfast on the roof. The Celal website is the best of the three. It gives good photo impressions of its interior, but is scarce in giving rates and prices. They should upload newer photo’s of their renovated roof terraces. At least the rack rates I saw announced in the lounge of the Ceal Sultan are higher than the rack rates of the Lady Diana published on their website. As everything in Istanbul one should negotiate the best rates.
The Kybele Hotel is just located between the two others and is also a very nice place for a drink, a lunch or a diner. It has a street terrace and a nice and cosy inner court terrace, without view, and is probably the cheapest of the three. I did not actually see their rooms, but I like the owner who decorated the hotel with thousands of small Turkish lamps (which he sells off course) and who, when we were looking at an Europa Cup football match between Istanbul’s Fenerbace and AC Milan, wore an AC Milan shirt, but was very satisfied that Fenerbace won 1-0 against AC Milan, the 2006 Europa Cup winner.
