Category: Websites

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

Oops: I changed my 404 error template because of Blogflux

Oops, I have changed my 404 template today [Ed: It has changed again since this post].

I  was a member of Blogflux.

Blogflux is a combination of several things: A Blog directory that has organized and cataloged about 82,000 blogs by country and by topic (or tag if you whish). They have some Blog tools, among which mapstats that they have knitted together with Google Maps, a nice feature that I like. It enables you to see from where people land on your Blog. As a free member you can have a little bit of statistical analysis. In the pro version you can have some more statistical analysis.

You see from where the people look at your Blog by the position of the red blobs on the map and you see where they land on your Blog by clicking those little red blobs.

In my case you see for instance many clicks on the posts archived as number 211. When you wanted to know what post number 211 was about, you could click on the blob and were redirected to the actual post.

That was when I had my permalinks organized by date of the post and archive number of the post.

Unfortunately I could not relate each time archive numbers to individual posts unless I clicked them again.

Therefore I have changed my archiving method into date of the post and name of the post. Post 211 ) is now
http://happyhotelier.nl/2006/11/13/qbic-dutch-answer-to-easy-hotel-yotel-and-hotel-everland/. As Qbic is hot nowadays because of their recent opening and Yotel also because of their first pod hotel at Heathrow.

I found an alternative way of getting at the same post by post number which is very easy: http://happyhotelier.nl/?p=211

My older posts will remain organized in the old way, at least for a certain period, in certain search engines. People clicking trough from those search engine results are now landing on my 404 page. How stupid am I!

However I have decided to stick to this choice and apologize to all those landing on my 404 page.

I hope that the search engines gradually will find their way around this Blog when they re index this Blog and the error will fade out in the future.

We will see.

Update

As of november 2009 I have a plugin in place that enables you to redirect outside referrals to urls of your blog that are wrong because you have changed the way you archive posts. With the Google Webmaster help you can from time to time reapair errors. I have now redirected 211 to the actual post.

Last edited by Happy Hotelier on February 17, 2010 at 10:30 am

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.

Austria: Schloss Velden, a Most Famous Hotel of the world reopened by a former associate of Bill Marriott on the move…

Could one have a better opening press release than one by Andreas Augustin himself? I don’t believe so.

Andreas is the man behind

Schloss Velden was officially opened on Sunday May 27 2007 with 7000 guests for the opening ceremony. On Monday May 28, 2007 it was opened for 300 guests who could have their first nap in this Castle originally dating back to 1590.

At the moment I write this I find it a bit strange there is no other form of communication about this opening on the sites:

  • of the hotel Cappella, Schloss Velden. Note the way the name is presented….and note its press page simply states:

    “Press Room…..We need information for this page. (sic!),

  • of the Management company Capella Hotels,

than a press release dated March 3, 2007…..

A Royally missed opportunity I would say in this Internet Millennium….

Rather than reiterating Andreas words, I will remain silent, until I have visited the place somewhere in the first half of 2008 and been able to look around and ride the Woerther Lake, preferably with this Boesch below….

Velden Boesch
Velden Boesch

BTW, I have asked former ultimate boss of Mr Horst Schulze who currently operates Capella and is a former COO of the Ritz Carlton Hotel Company LLC, a Marriot subsidiary, i.e. Mr Bill Marriott, whether he would like to comment on this new venture of his former associate Mr Horst Schulze in his Blog Marriot on the move. Why? Because there is some scepsis in the world of travel Bloggers whether the Blog of Mr Marriott is a pure unbiased blog or a simple means of self promotion (proclamation?) of the Marriott on the move community.

Mr Marriott’s Blog’s “terms of use” state inter alia:

We will only post comments that are relevant and appropriate to the Marriott on the Move community. It may take a couple of days for your posting to appear, especially on weekends, or it may not be published at all. We may react to some comments either individually or as a cluster of comments on the same topic. While there is a possibility your comment may not be published at all, we truly hope by laying out the “rules of the road” we will avoid that from happening as much as possible. For example, a posting about a particular element of our service at many our hotels would be addressed on this blog. On the other hand, a posting that raises a specific issue or billing dispute may instead be referred to our Customer Care or another department, so we can work directly with you to resolve the issue. If you a have specific issue or billing dispute, please contact our Customer Care group at https://www.marriott.com/marriott/contact.mi. You should not assume that a posting on this blog constitutes notice to Marriott of any such matters or for any legal purposes.

and:

The bottom line is that we want to hear from you – both the positive and negative!

Recently however they allowed a negative comment:

Posted By: matz (27/05/2007 10:16:28 PM)
Comment: Quite a blog you run. Everyone seems to love uncle Bill and the Marriott hotels. Why not, for the sake of honesty, publish less complimentary comments (my comments were ignored. I will find other venues outside the “family” As a lifetime platinum guest ,more recently a former guest who prefers to boycott your operation, I am highly insulted Your community service is admirable. Pay attention to your non-existing customer service

Let’s see what happens.

Update 1

My questiond disappeared unanswered from Mr Marriot’s blog.

Update 2

I was trying to weed out dead links in various posts and found out this:

We are sorry to inform you that Schloss Velden is no longer managed by Capella Hotels and Resorts. We hope, however, that you will choose to visit one of our other Capella Hotels.

Last edited by GJE on December 5, 2011 at 4:56 pm

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.