The Urban Camouflage Project (Street Art 16)


On a bit lighter note than volcanic ash I like to share the Urban Camouflage Project with you. It is a project of Sabina Keric and Yvonne Bayer who started Urban Camouflage in 2007 during an exchange term at Konstfack – and continued in 2009. their website is built with indexhibit an easy and free way of presenting a portfolio in use by thousands of artists and maybe also a possibility for small hotel and B&B owners to present their accommodation.

Urban Camouflage deals with the question how to camouflage oneself and one’s identity in the commercial space. The costumes are inspired by «ghillie suits», the camouflage suits of snipers and hunters.

The commercial space is a clean and untouched area. Usually there are no artistic activities.

The customer expects nothing out of ordinary in a world of brands and price labels. Our project exeeds the limit and enters the world of commerce without any permission.

We chose the big superstores because of the extreme range of goods, the flashing monitors and the large salesrooms. The camouflaged person blends into the surrounding. He or she can dissapear for one moment and gets the possibility to merge with the supermarket to defend from the noise of commerce.

The costumes were made out of simple and cheap materials, the camouflage effect isn’t only about the colour, it’s also about the three-dimensional structure.

The reactions were different. As before mentioned, we didn’t ask for a permission. Most employees reacted humorously, but we had some trouble with the managment as well and had to quit some actions earlier than we wanted to.

The reactions of customers were also very different. Some were interested and tried to touch the costume, others reacted irritated and stayed in some distance. There were also customers who ignored us completely, it seemed like if they just didn’t want to get irritated by us.

Iceland Volcanic Ash Disrupts European Air Travel on an Unprecedented Scale

Hazardous volcanic ash
I captured the above photo from a series of three documentary videos on Youtube [That since publication have disappeared]. The picture and the videos show the dangers of volcanic ash for air travel best: It abrazes not only the paint, but also the aluminum of the aircraft heavily.

The dangers are:

  1. Pilots can’t notice it, because, apart from areas near an eruption, it is very fine. Even near an eruption pilots can’t notice it on on board flight radar, because there is not enough moist in a cloud of volcanic ash
  2. Volcanic ash is very abrasive as the above photo from the tail of flight BA 009 shows: Almost all paint was stripped from it.
  3. when sucked into a jet motor, it can cause immense damage and cause the motor to stop. On 1982 flight 009 over Indonesia all four jets stopped and luckily the pilots were able to restart the engines when they had flown out of the ash cloud and prevent a crash..


The beauty of the eruption that causes all the problems:
This is a fantastic photo of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland by Örvar-Atli that causes a huge cloud of volcanic ash to spread all over Europe that is bringing almost all air trafic to a stand still as of yesterday. It will continue today and it wouldn’t surprise me if it will continue for a couple of more days.

It is a very wise decision to ground almost all air traffic in view of the above indicated hazards.

Ash influences hotel stays
Guests from Canada are stuck in London and had to cancel their stay at my hotel last minute. Do I charge them a late cancellation fee? Off course not.

Commercially viable? Maybe, maybe not.

I could claim a late cancellation fee and have them claim their loss from their travel insurance company. However I wouldn’t like to add that as an extra burden to them while they are already burdened with all the uncertainties and changes of plan due to these extra ordinary circumstances

..and you know what? I expect my guests to be and think a bit like I do myself. I hate to claim something from an insurance company, because I believe I should only claim when there is an extraordinary cost I cannot reasonably bear myself. I was once bailed out by a travel insurance company when I was stuck with a car in a foreign country that could not be repaired that country. Not only did they repatriate my car to The Netherlands and paid for the car repair, they also let me continue our travels with a rented car that I delivered here in The Netherlands. Almost no loss of holiday pleasures.

And our guest wrote me: “Thank you so much! When we rebook our trip you will be our first choice to stay with. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your kindness.”

High Five (10): Don’t Hack your son’s FB Account, Body functions, Unfavorable Blog Commenting and a Balloon Rescue Kit

Happy-Hotelier-High-Five-5

High Five Time:

  1. A mum who hacked her son’s Face Book Account faces Harassment Charges according to AOL.
  2. As every blogger is facing flaming comments, this guest post on Problogger gives food for thought and/or action: The Day I Was Flamed At My Blog (And 7 Steps To Handle Flames With Grace).
  3. I had a post in mind titled “The Art of Breastfeeding”, because the photos at this post The Most Obscene Debate On the Internet seem too intruding into the mother’s (or the baby’s) privacy imho, but there are so many layers to that I refrained from it.
  4. At Quite Alone there is that debate about to pay or not to pay to pee or to store cabin luggage…Wee shall overcome. Airlines are getting cheap, Really!
  5. At Yanko design a Rescue Balloon Kit by Jaeseok Han was suggested to prevent you getting lost in a jungle trek.

You can find more high fives in my category High Five.

If you want to draw my attention to a post, please use the Contact Page or give me a message at Twitter

Update
The Breastfeeding issue kept me thinking until I found this hilarious photo which was on auction recently at Phillips de Pury and Company:

DePhoCussing from ITB 2010 (1)

I have many impressions to share from the PhoCusWright Travel Bloggers Summit at ITB Berlin.

For a change I will start with my last impression: I was interviewed for the Austrian Tourism Blog.

Thought of posting it first and adding more later when I’ve sorted the lot.

The interview was made by Rainer Edlinger of Edei’s Blog Recently Rainer was promoted to Hauptmann of the Zell am See Tourism office.

A Blog is a Hotelier’s Best Friend

A Blog Is A Hotelier’s Best Friend

View more presentations by me at Slideshare.

As promised: My presentation for the Hotel Marketing Conference of March 25, 2010. For more presentations at the conference see their Hotel Website Marketing Blog