Category: Trends

Qbic Amsterdam: First guest reviews are in!

Qbic Hotelroom
Photo (or artist impression?) thanks to the Trip
Advisor review mentioned below.

I announced the Qbic Hip Hotels concept in a post in November last year.

Since the news of their belated opening I have been looking for guest reviews for Qbic Amsterdam.

Now they are out:

  • One on Tripadvisor:

    Wow!

    I paid €59 per night (all taxes included), and got to stay in a cool design hotel and sleep in a Hästens bed. That’s what I call a good deal.

    The room was really cool. A unit with the bed, and bathroom connected put into the space. And even the wallpaper included information on a local bar and store in the city. Really handy and smart.

    Really for me Qbic offers amazing quality and the best price in the market.

    t is not in the city center but in the World Trade Center. But with public transport it was easy to get into town. Just about 15mins…

    I am hooked. From here on I am at QBic whenever I go to Amsterdam…

    A solo traveler from Barcelona, age 25-34

  • Six on the site of Booking.com. They publish them as soon as they have six reviews to prevent biased outcomes…therefor we had to wait. It also appears from the reviews that for guests they opened July 4.

    1 Guest score: 7 out of 10

    + Very clean and modern rooms, and extremely comfortable bed. Helpful staff aided check-in process and switching of rooms when problems discovered. Soothing and comfortable shower with huge overhead spigot in addition to hand held spigot.

    – Wireless Internet didn’t work in first room tried. No hooks for towels in bathroom. Some rooms have no windows. Televisions mounted on walls at such an angle as to make in-bed viewing impossible due to screen glare. Water from bathroom tap had slight rubbery taste. Travelling between hotel floors uses same elevators as the rest of WTC visitors. Room climate subject to settings of entire building; no per-room control.

    Anonymous (Solo traveler) from Netherlands – July 12, 2007
    2 Guest score: 9 out of 10

    + a very hip and trendy hotel, god value and the beds sleep excellent

    Enid (With friends) from terheijden, Netherlands – July 7, 2007

    3 Guest score: 9.5 out of 10

    + excellent value for the quality

    – since it was opened for only two days there were some unfinished details that need to be polished.

    Heath (Young couple) from Durango, USA – July 6, 2007

    4 Guest score: 8 out of 10
    + Dee Einrichtung und die tollen Lichter (interior and fancy lighting)

    – Es gab Dusche/WC im Zimmer aber ohne Vorhang/Türe oder irgendwas vor dem WC… (Nur kleines Wändchen wegen dem Wasser/Duschen) (No doors or curtains in front of the WC/shower stall only a tiny provision against shower splatter)

    Christine (With friends) from Liestal, Switzerland – July 19, 2007

    5 Guest score: 10 out of 10

    + Dat je midden in de nacht kan inchecken (possible to check in in the midst of the night)

    – Het ontbijt was goed alleen weinig keuze voor op brood (small choice of things for on your bread)

    Henny (With friends) from Heerenveen, Netherlands – July 10, 2007

    6 Guest score: 8 out of 10

    Wico (Young couple) from sambeek, Netherlands – July 9, 2007

This is not bad, not bad at all! I congratulate Qbic with this success, especially as it looks as if Qbic is sold out continuously.

Happy Hotelier becomes a Trend Hunter

TrendHunterLogoAd468x60c

I have Trend Hunter Magazine in my Google Reader for some time, and was browsing and searching the site. Accidentally I signed up, because it induces you to look at “unpublished trends” and then you get curious, wouldn’t you? It is free anyway.

After signing up I noticed that at Trend Hunter Magazine you can maintain your own Blog alike page, which they call “Portfolio”. You can use it to comment, they call it “to crave”, posts of other Trend Hunters. You can also submit trends.

So my Portfolio at Trend Hunter is now: Happy Hotelier, Trend Hunter. On that page you see the most recent trends I have submitted. Actually I was quite surprised that the first three trends that I submitted, both from this Blog as from my other blog Chair Blog, were published almost immediately.

If you want to see my “favorites”, then hit Happy Hotelier Favorites. To be precise: the header of the page is the same, but the url is different.

The amazing thing is that the whole site is just a One Man Show: Jeremy Gutsche’s.

If you want to know more about Jeremy, click the Interview with Jeremy Gutsche, Founder of Trend Hunter by Nigel Goodwin.

Each Trend Hunter has his own page. I’m not sure whether you see only trends that were published when you are not logged in on those pages. Each published trend has the respective hunter next to the full post. So when you get used to it, it has nice navigation possibilities.

There are of course plenty of lists of top Trend Hunters: Those with the most published trends, those with the most cravings, those with the most traffic and so on. There is also a community with a “Wall” to write on.

In addition to its main magazine it has several subject related “magazines”.
For me the Hip Hotel Reviews magazine is off course of interest. It has a separate URL as well at Hot Hotel Reviews.

I also noticed that famous international trendy design, interior, fashion and travel magazine cum website Wallpaper* signed up as Walpaper*, Trend Hunter recently. So I believe to be in good company of them and the more than 13.000 Trend Hunters.

Trend Hunter Magazine offers a 50/50 split of revenue from Google Adsence, but I am not very interested in getting paid per click.

All in all Trend Hunter Magazine has a lot of Web 2.0 features: User generated content, syndication, community building…and a Technorati authority of 1,169 and a Technorati rank of 1,898…not bad for a one man Blog, although assisted by 13.000 and something Trend Hunters. The fact that you are able to build a community with 13.000 and something people on your own is amazing in itself.

And thanks Jeremy for the help with my first steps on your platform with a bit idiosyncratic interface!

New York City: Bike – Share Project: 42 years behind the Dutch!

Usually reading through my Google News Reader I get tons of inspiration for this Blog and I don’t have the time to convert all inspiration into actual posts here.

From time to time I click and share in my reader and so I sort of built a second Blog, gje’s shared items, of items I like to address and sometimes really do address, but usually don’t. Until now I haven’t found a better way of sharing the news from the travel and luxury Blog community. In a window in the right column you see the newest items I have shared.

NYC Bike Sharing

So in my Google News Reader i found this post Pedaling, the Bike-Sharing Project of Archinect. It caught my eye as I noticed recently there is a nice Bike Sharing running in Vienna under the name City Bike Wien.

For us Dutchmen this bike sharing is a very old idea. In 1965 Dutch Provo launched the White Bike Plan. Here is a nice write up about the anti establishment movement Provo. It also explains a bit of the origins of the Dutch coffeeshop culture. Her is another Write up that explains how the 2 White Bike (sharing) plans that actually were launched in Amsterdam didn’t work out. However there is a White Bikes plan running uninterruptedly since 1975 at the Dutch National Park De Hoge Veluwe.

After re reading this post, I decided I need to flesh this post out much more, albeit that the time constraints will make it appear in a bit random order:

  • This post is especially of interest after the magic 07-07-07 Live Earth series of concerts.
  • By coincidence (does coincidence really exist?) I noticed my fellow Travel Blogger Melissa Petri reported about City Bike Wien in her post Bike in Vienna for Europe String just last month….BTW Europe string was a finalist for the Travvies 2007 in February of this year
  • This seems a copy of the original Witte Fietsen Plan (“White Bike Sharing Manifesto”) by the Provo movement in the Dutch language.
    Original Dutch White Bike Sharing Manifesto
    Provo White Bike Sharing Manifesto

    The White Bicycle Plan proposes to create bicycles for public use that cannot be locked.
    ‘The white bicycle symbolizes simplicity and healthy living, as opposed to the gaudiness and filth of the authoritarian automobile.’

  • And here is a photo of the official presentation of the Provo White Bike Sharing Manifesto:
    PROVO PRESENTS THE WHITE BIKE SHARING MANIFESTO OFICCIALLY
    Provo presents the White Bike Sharing Manifesto
  • There even is is an official White Bike Sculpture in the Netherlands:
    White Bike Sharing Sculpture in Holland
    Dutch white bike sculpture.
    The man is real size, not the bike!
  • The Provo Movement in Amsterdam eventually led to the famous sleep in of Yoko Ono and John Lennon in Amsterdam Hilton:
    LENNON ONO HILTON SLEEP IN
    John Lennon and Yoko Ono Sleep In
  • I have a feeling there are European subsidies for bike sharing projects if I read this: Case Study
  • Bike For All, a site dedicated to Biking news brings the news that on 07 07 07 4 friends will arrive at the London Tour de France prologue start having biked 777 miles across 7 countries in 7 days, visiting 7 Tour de France Prologue cities in order to raise money for World Bicycle relief and for Jole Rider in order to enable them to donate Bikes to third world countries

Weekendhotel.nl and hoteliers.nl working together

The site Weekendhotel.nl was set up by Willem and Esme Vos: Willem has a background in travel and tourism and Esme in intellectual property law and Internet related matters.

We started Weekendhotel in April 2002 to help you find the best addresses for a weekend away. Like you, we became frustrated with typical booking sites that serve chain hotels desperate to dump their unsold inventory.

We were looking for something more personal and atmospheric, a site that would bring together the most charming hotels and B&B’s with character. Because we did not find such a site, we decided to create our own and weekendhotel.nl was born.

How they work is explained more in detail here.

In order to enhance the usability of the site Willem has built a simple inventory database for available rooms that each hotelier can keep up to date. Thus the user of the site can easily make a choice for a hotel to stay. The only problem is the maintenance of the data. The Hoteliers have to keep the inventory up to date almost daily or at least each time the inventory changes. This in itself is a nightmare for hoteliers of a small size hotel/B&B, especially when he has to allocate inventory over several sites where rooms can be booked on line…. Consequently the inventory of Weekendhotel is not always 100% up to date.

In 2005 a couple of graduates of a Dutch Hotel School have set up Hoteliers.nl (which is the same as Hoteliers.com) in cooperation with the Dutch Horeca Association to which association many Dutch Hotels belong, in order to create a possibility for hotels and B&B’s to be bookable on line. Both via the sites of Hotelier, but also via a link with Hotelier through their own site. The hotels pay a moderate monthly fee for the use of the site rather than the commissions they have to pay to the bigger portals. The site grows and works satisfactorily.

Weekendhotel.nl is more the content site and has details about approximately 1200 small Dutch and Belgian hotels and B&b’s and approximately 6000 unique visitors per day. Hotelier.nl is more the technically driven site that since inception has now approximately 600 participants including hotels belonging to chains or conglomerates.

Recently, the two have officially announced their cooperation whereby the site Weekendhotel.nl is linked with the inventory system of Hotelier.nl. If the hotelier wishes to have his property on both sites, he only has to maintain his inventory on the Hotelier.nl site.

I am glad with this new development to which, in the background, I could contribute a bit.

Qbic: Dutch answer to Easy Hotel, Yotel and Hotel Everland

Qbic

Begin November 2006 the launch of Qbic Hip Hotels was announced by Paul Rinkens, Rino Soeters en Marcel Voermans, the people behind Design hotel La Bergère and Hip Hotel St Martenslane, both in Maastricht, as the Dutch answer to cube alike hotel concepts as Easy Hotel, Yotel and Hotel Everland:

Qbic Hip Hotel Amsterdam Center (at WTC, Strawinskylaan 241) is anticipated to open in March 2007.

Qbic Hip Hotel Antwerpen (at Sint Paulusstraat 42 / Lange Koepoortstraat 6) is anticipated to open in June 2007.

Each Cube will cover 7 m2 with a living room, King Size Hästens beds, Philippe Starck design bathroom elements, TV, radio, safe and wireless Internet access.

With individually adjustable varicolored led lights guests can establish their own atmosphere. Easily changeable wall panels will give the guest the possibility to adjust the atmosphere further.

The lobby in Amsterdam will be designed by Feran Thomassen and for Antwerp by Ontwerpers.nu (i.e. Designers.Now!). They envisage a digital “concierge kiosk” where through an ‘i- touch’ screen guests can gather the necessary information about things to do, where to wine and dine and where to party, or to contact a Qbic staff member who will be available on site.

Also a self service shop is anticipated for all amenities and necessities.

Pricing will be done by the “the-earlier-the-reservation-the-lower-the-price” system and vary from Euro 39,- to Euro 139,-.

Realization by PRM.

Last edited by GJE on December 3, 2011 at 11:43 pm