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)!

Valencia: America's Cup by Louis Vuitton post # 13

KIWI BRA

Yesterday the Kiwis lost a spinnaker (it literally blew up) and subsequently formed a Bra when hoisting the replacing spinnaker. So they lost their race. Today the Swiss won another race and are one win from winning the 32nd America’s Cup. Alinghi-Emirates 4-2.

I am glad, because I definitely would like to attend the 33rd edition IRL (In Real Life) and New Zealand is a bit far down under.

Amstelveen: Corneille in the Cobra Museum

Corneille
Photo: ANP/UNITED PHOTOS/ROBIN VAN LONKHUIJSEN
via AD

Amstelveen is a suburb of Amsterdam. It has the Cobra Museum, the only museum devoted to the Cobra Group of artists. Actually it should be spelled CoBrA, because its participants came from Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam.

Corneille (Guillaume Corneille van Beverloo) is the only Cobra member still alive. Soon he’ll have the respectable age of 85. Here he is pictured with two of his paintings, Birds and Woman. As Corneille puts it: “They go perfectly together!”

This summer work of Corneille is exhibited under the title “Some of These Days” in the Cobra Museum.

Valencia: America's Cup by Louis Vuitton post # 12

After yesterday’s loss today, the Swiss managed to square the Kiwis with a win: 2-2 now and give us the closest America’s Cup match in many years!

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