The Happier the Hotelier, The Happier the Guest
Currently H.R.H Prince Willem Alexander of The Netherlands (left) is clean shaven. He will be the first King in over 100 years after his mother H.M. Queen Beatrix (right) will abdicate in favor of him on April 30, 2013. However according to a funny FacBook page Zonder Baard Geen Koning (i.e. No Beard? No King!) which started yesterday and collected some 20,000 likes in its first 24 hours, Willem-Alexander has still 90 days to grow a nice beard.
You might consider a notel after visiting a new site on the block: Hotel Haiku, curated by Garri Rayne.
Hotel Haiku has taken up the idea of describing Hotels and, more importantly notels in a real Zen way, with a Haiku:
haiku [ˈhaɪkuː] n. A Japanese lyric verse form having three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables, traditionally invoking an aspect of nature or the seasons.
I’m particularly attracted to the term notel, because when I started out as a hotelier and was developing our own unique 3 suites only “hotel” Haagsche Suites, I had for some time the idea of naming it Not a Hotel. Eventually I decided to name it “Haagsche Suites” (i.e. suites of The Hague), because Not A Hotel sounded a bit negative. Never thought of notel.
I congratulate Hotel Haiku with the invention of this term notel. As they describe it:
notel [nəʊˈtɛl] n. An exceptional, often architecturally designed, holiday and vacation rental property that draws inspiration from the design hotel phenomenon.
So notel is beyond Hotel, beyond Hip Hotel, beyond Boutique Hotel, beyond Design Hotel or beyond what hotel have you and at the same time it is below the usual hotel radar. Thank you Hotel Haiku!
First Hotel Haiku (@hotelhaiku) found me via Twitter and I noticed it without paying much attention. Then I found out more about the site via our friends over at Tnooz. I refer to their review of the Hotel Haiku site.
I’m set to explore the phenomenon further and created even a notel category, because I’ve featured some notels here on the blog already.
Update:
As Garri pointed out in his comment the undercast n is essential for the idea behind the term notel , so I have edited all, but couldn’t withstand to add little bit of my own: red 🙂
If you click this or the image, it is better readable.
There is a lot of speculation online whether Google will dive into travel and what will happen then. But I say: Google is already heavy in travel. A big chunk of their income is generated by OTA’s (Online Travel Agents) who pay hefty to Google for their adwords and ppc’s. Google is scary!
Infographic by PPC Blog
Regular readers know I publish on the side at Trendhunter, a cool community that scores the net in search of everything trendy.
Actually if you are really curious to know into what direction fashion, style, architecture, design, hotels, marketing, advertizing and many more topics are moving: Trendhunter offers you a daily one stop opportunity to remain up to date.
Like me, you could consider to become a free member and enjoy the thrill of a hyper trendy and creative community.
Being part of that community enables me to share with you a sneak preview of a very interesting upcoming book by the chief of the tribe, Jeremy Gutsche, Exploiting Chaos.
Jeremy is becoming one of the trend gurus by his own of this era. More than 30,000 members of the community contribute he skillfully knitted together contribute trends to the TrendHunter site. Like no one else Jeremy has his finger on the pulse of the crowds, or the tribes like Seth Godin likes to call us. He offers great insight and a chance to reflect on the near future.
DID YOU KNOW THAT Hewlett-Packard, Disney, Hyatt, MTV, CNN, Microsoft, Burger King, and GE all started during periods of economic recession? Periods of uncertainty fuel tremendous opportunity, but they also reshuffle the deck and change the rules of the game. That’s where EXPLOITING CHAOS comes in…
Read in the Sneak Preview about the fast changes that affect big companies and how small entrepreneurs were and will be able to thrive on new ideas.
The book will be available in the bookstores from September 1, 2009.
You can now download a 45 page Sneak Preview for free!
Twitter founders are working on a book about Twitter. The accompanying blog can be found here. Just in a time when Twitter is becoming mainstream….
Twitter was born about three years ago, when @Jack, @Biz, @Noah, @Crystal, @Jeremy, @Adam, @TonyStubblebine, @Ev, me (@Dom), @Rabble, @RayReadyRay, @Florian, @TimRoberts, and @Blaine worked at a podcasting company called Odeo, Inc. in South Park, San Francisco. The company had just contributed a major chunk of code to Rails 1.0 and had just shipped Odeo Studio, but we were facing tremendous competition from Apple and other heavyweights. Our board was not feeling optimistic, and we were forced to reinvent ourselves.
“Rebooting” or reinventing the company started with a daylong brainstorming session where we broke up into teams to talk about our best ideas. I was lucky enough to be in @Jack’s group, where he first described a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing. We happened to be on top of the slide on the north end of South Park. It was sunny and brisk. We were eating Mexican food. His idea made us stop eating and start talking.
I remember that @Jack’s first use case was city-related: telling people that the club he’s at is happening. “I want to have a dispatch service that connects us on our phones using text.” His idea was to make it so simple that you don’t even think about what you’re doing, you just type something and send it. Typing something on your phone in those days meant you were probably messing with T9 text input, unless you were sporting a relatively rare smartphone. Even so, everyone in our group got the idea instantly and wanted it.
Interesting Stuff