Category: Hotels

French Riviera and the Art of Booking Hotels Online: Nothing Zen! Part 3

Map of the French Riviera

We are taking a couple of days off after five months of 7/7 and 24/24 service to our dear guests. Destination: French Riviera. Just a couple of days on the board of a private swimming pool or a beach. Late breakfast, rest, lunch on the beach, rest, read a book, rest, small dinner, maybe some sightseeing, maybe some boating.
We put our plans for a trip to Copenhagen on the back burner as May, June and July gave us mediocre weather after an unusually hot April.

Where to stay?

First: where not to stay:

Not in Don Cesar, Cap d’ Antibes
We have stayed a couple of times at 4 star Hotel Don Cesar. Nicely located on Cap d’Antibes and near to one of our favorite beaches. However, the last time we stayed there, it proved more and more worn out. It doesn’t particularly look inviting to go back. This observation seems in line with those of Tripavisor reviews.
[Update: after a refurbishment the hotel is now know as Hotel Vogue]
Nor in Domaine Cocagne, Cagne sur Mer
Domaine Cocagne originated from a camping with some holiday apartments. It has Dutch owners and was not so long ago thoroughly and very nicely refurbished under guidance of a well known Dutch Designer, Jan des Bouvries: It has good location, a nice restaurant, nice beds and clean and almost white interior. However the guests that frequent there do not fit with the quietness and rest we are looking for. Especially since I had breakfast there with the pleasure of looking out over the swimming pool with a couple of ladies in a string only already loudly occupying their day beds (afraid as they were the beds would be gone for the day) while their figures would only be flattered by a bathing suit (even a bikini would have looked gross)….This view didn’t go well with the excellent shambled (pardon: scrambled) eggs I had for breakfast. In addition the owner made it very rudely clear to a couple of dear Gay friends of us who planned a stay for 2 or 3 months in the hotel, that he didn’t like gay people. Thirdly we noted a very high alcohol consumption of several hotel guests. These issues make me think twice to go there ever again. Hm they even have no reviews on Tripadvisor for this hotel.

True to my own principle I started browsing some trusted sites with hand picked accommodations.

  • Hotels of the Rich and Famous is easy navigable. Its map is excellent and combined with its listed properties it is quick and easy navigable. Certainly not so cluttered as some other sites. It comes up with: Chateau Eza in Eze (between Beaulieu and Monaco. Definitely a possibility as it is close to Bealieu where we like to visit friends one day and very close to Chateau de La Chèvre d’Or where a dinner or lunch has been on my wish list for quite some time already. It appears Chateau Eza is a Stein Group Hotel which operated the Dylan (formerly Blakes and now up for sale by owner Apollo Group) and The College Hotel, both in Amsterdam. I also didn’t know yet that Chateau de La Chèvre d’Or is a hotel as well. Alas it looks much more stuffy than Eza.
  • Kiwi Collection mentions:
    • Le Mas Candille in Mougins which actually is a bit too far from the beaches,
    • Chateau Eza in Eze (again),
    • Cap Estel Eze, Bord de Mer (down by the sea), even a Kiwi Collection WOW pick, but no availability,
    • Le Mas de Pier in Saint Paul de Vence
    • Villa Belrose, near St Tropez that is a bit far from where we want to stay
    • La Reserve de Beaulieu in Beaulieu, and
    • Le Saint Paul in Saint Paul de Vence

    I very much appreciate the fact that the Kiwi collection gives the urls of all their featured hotels, notwithstanding they do not have maps available on their site

  • Chic Retreats offers:

    Chic retreats could use maps on its site or give the urls of the property. However Lulu herself recently promised me to do the urls soon (she recently had asked the member hotels to provide them, but did get only one reply).

  • XO Private Collection just sent me an invitation by e-mail to join their XO Private Insider. I thought for a moment “Wow am I privileged”, but I now see you can click on it from its Main Page. I still do wonder from where the invitation came. I like the fact that they provide all info in a write up and simply link through to the website of the accommodation itself. It has (in addition to Eza and Cap d’Estel):
  • Luxury Culture suggests:
    • Hotel du Castellet in an old glass factory north of Bandol near Toulon, too far away for our present plans, but worthwhile to remember,
    • Domaine des Andeols North of Apt, an Alain Ducasse property, too far away but also to remember

    The luxury culture flash presentations are really nice to get good impressions of the properties and I would say a better impression than any video as yet could give

  • A fellow hotel blogger, Hotel Blogs 2.0, suggested:
    • Mas Artigny in St Paul de Vence [ed: Noted closed permanently in 2017], or
    • Villa St Maxime, near St Tropez
  • Another travel blogger in the know, Blog on Travel, suggested go to Clos des Arts from the SLH portfolio in Colle Sur Loup.
  • Then a very good friend of us mentioned Hotel Welcome in Villefranche sur mer. Oh I like that location: It is the second Bay west from Monaco and has a lot of shipping movements as it is frequented by mega yachts and by large cruising vessels who can anchor for free during a couple of hours or waiting until their berth in Nice is free to proceed or are seeking a nice location for a hop of for a stroll or a lunch ashore.

The Verdict:
I have split our stay over two hotels: Bastide Mathieu and Hotel Welcome.
Stay tuned for my reviews.
At least for future visits I can rely on this post which will help to save some time…

Last edited by GJE on December 6, 2011 at 7:24 am

Zwolle: First Sandton Pillows 5* Hotel to open 1st August 2007

Pillows Front
Hotel Pillows Front (artist impression)
Pillows Suite
Hotel Pillows Suite

Thanks to Tourpress I know that small independent Dutch hotel group Sandton will open its first Pillows 5* Hotel with 44 rooms in Zwolle, The Netherlands, on August 1, 2007.

A first, because Sandton has announced a second Pillows hotel for 2008 in Amsterdam and considers more hotels with the Pillows concept.

I announced this hotel in June last year.

Really Quick: Chic Retreats

Chic Retreats Logo

The title of Chic Retreats‘ website is:

Boutique hotel collection – Chic Retreats is a portfolio of hip hotels, small luxury hotels, boutique hotels and charming hotels all with less than 30 rooms.

Now that is a cry from my heart, as the term “Boutique Hotel” (I found a description at Hospitality Net in an article from Lucienne Anhar dating back to 2001) seems to have been devaluated to “Just another Boutique Hotel”, certainly now Ian Schrager, somehow the inventor, or at least an avid promoter, of the term “Boutique Hotel” has announced a new cooperation with good old Bill Marriott..the multi hundred room hotel advocate…

I tagged Chic Retreats on my Deli Icio Us page on August 19, 2006. However I am sure I had the link between my favorites much earlier.

Last week I clicked them again coincidentally and I quickly found two hotels from my wish list – Sezz in Paris and Hollmann Beletage in Vienna – in their portfolio. So, on a spur -or should I say a whim?-, I filled out their form to become a member hotel. I got an immediate answer that showed acceptable flat rates and no commissions. I answered back our interest immediately. Today, cecking my e-mail: Big surprise: I found that Lulu , the owner of the site, had put our Haagsche Suites already on the website. Now that is really quick! Chapeau!

Side note:
Editing this post is slowed down considerably by the America’s Cup Anywhere application while waiting for the postponed start of what is probably the last race in the 32nd Auld Mug Match (who said man cannot do two or more things at the same time?) …Ok, “race abandoned” it says now. I am glad I am not on the race committee there! AC Anywhere clicked away and further concentrating on this post:..

The Chic Retreats site is nice, user friendly, quick, with one disadvantage though: It doesn’t offer links to the properties….and the site does not offer much information about Lulu.

Some research brings to the surface from Live Style Retreats:

Lulu Townsend is a qualified tennis coach and a qualified reflexologist.

She speaks French, Spanish and Italian and has lived in all three countries – 36 yrs young, dynamic and passionate about small hotels – she was responsible for marketing of her parent’s hotel Palazzo Terranova, one of the finest country house hotels in Italy.

She really believes that quality doesn’t always have to only mean luxury and high prices but personal service and attention to detail – guests like to be a person and not just a room number.

Lulu is married with a two young beautiful daughters.

Additionally I found a Food and Wine interview with her.

More admiration here, as she is attending the Luxury Travel Fair in London this weekend, changes her website in between while undoubtedly changing some diapers under way, and does not even go to see tennis at Wimbledon (or taste the strawberries there)!

VibeAgent: The ultimate web 2.0 hotel site?

VibeAgent Home Page

Recently VibeAgent launched its beta testing … finally…it was supposed to launch half April: As my DW says every day: “I hate those computers, there is always something!”

Eons ago, actually in March 2007, Adam Healy, co founder of VibeAgent, very kindly noted my T-List and L-List page in a post Most Comprehensive List of Travel Blogs Ever of the VibeAgent Blog that he apparently maintains to warm up the travel community for VibeAgent. Oops and now I noticed I didn’t add VibeAgent Blog to the T-List, although technically he didn’t add any content there. Ha ha, in the VibeAgent terms he acted there as a wallflower. Omission repaired in the meantime.

Adam promised me an invite to VibeAgent once the Beta would be launched. I got a bit sad when the invite didn’t arrive, while I saw Guillaume posting something about VibeAgent Hotel Blogs by Guillaume Thevenot a month ago and Les Explorers two weeks ago.

A couple of days ago the invite landed in my mailbox. Hurray

I rummaged around in the site a bit.

Presently Jens Traenhart has probably the most extensive post about VibeAgent. It is worthwhile reading!

What is VibeAgent About?

It is meant to be a community that shares hotel reviews on the one hand and combines that with best price searching on the other hand.

The members are called Agents. They write the reviews. They are unpaid.

VibeAgent has teamed up with an impressive list of travel and hotel portals at the back end, like Price Line, Booking.com and many others.

If you want to write a review about a hotel somewhere, VibeAgent comes with an impressive list of hotels in the area you chose. All automatically and truely web2.0 alike. At this stage 83.000 hotels are accessible.

There will be no advertising on the site. This is a big advantage as for instance on TripAdvisor a lot of bandwidth is taken by all the ads.

On the other hand it will act as a meta search engine for all the providers of accommodation. A sort of portal to the portals.

It claims that if you are searching for a hotel they have the best available price for you. However in this beta phase you get only the result. There is no short list as I have seen on other price comparison sites.

A big advantage above other sites that generate user reviews, is that if you participate you can communicate with the fellow reviewers. Hopefully that sifts out the biased reviews.

In the meantime the number of invitees is growing exponentially to a couple of hundreds. I am curious to see if they can meet up the requested bandwidth ultimately.

How will VibeAgent cover its costs? It will receive a percentage from the bookings made.

Well we will see and I will keep you posted.

By the way, it was Esme’s today’s post, actually more of a rant, on Pajama Entrepreneur who triggered this post.

Istanbul and the art of booking a hotel online: Nothing Zen! Part 2

After publishing part 1 of this story, I asked my friend the frequently traveling CEO, for suggestions, but alas he had no other suggestions than only Istanbul’s most expensive and luxury top hotels. So there I go with my conclusion in part 1.

My lady friend who organizes the trip for “Art en Route” came up with a travel agency that suggested following hotels:

and

Finally, however, on suggestion of the travel agent, a reservation has been made at the Celal Sultan Hotel.

We will see what will happen and I will keep you posted later this year.

Just for now I would like to conclude that at least for group travel a travel agent still seems a better bet than a DIY reservation. Especially because various hotels put only a small number of rooms available through travel portals or even through their own website, or have no possibilities to book well in advance.