Category service
Who’s in charge?
Having worked in all kinds of environments and cultures, I am constantly fascinated by the comments I see from guests about their hotel stay. Here are some odds and ends from the daily routine of a typical resort operation – unbelievably, they are all real comments! The weather: – “your brochure sells sunshine. […]
The Restaurant and Hotel Guests from Hell!!
The internet loves a horror story. The pages of the Daily Mail are full of stories about our industry and the problems encountered on a seemingly hourly basis! Rude staff, foreign object in meals, woeful restaurant hygiene, bed bugs, why you should unpack your luggage in the bathroom (yes, really!) and many more… If you […]
Using Instagram in Hospitality – a bit of a No-Brainer!
Many people thought Mark Zuckerberg crazy for spending US$1 billion to buy Instagram back in 2012, but now it has established itself as a leading social media channel. According to Statista (statista.com) Instagram had more than 700 million active users as of April 2017 and was continuing to grow at a pace. Whilst originally skewed […]
The Bold and the Beautiful…. an ode to the Executive Housekeeper
For many years, female Executive Housekeepers were an integral part of a luxury hotel operation. Starting at the very beginning of the post war hotel industry and going back to the days when Juan Trippe pioneered 5 star hotels to accommodate his PAN AM passengers and a gutsy Texan by the name of Conrad Hilton […]
The Conde Nast Gold List: The Favourite Hotels of 2016…. where is yours?
I have just seen the recent ‘Gold List’ of favourite hotels for 2016 from ‘Conde Nast’ and to my amazement haven’t found a single hotel in the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Egypt or Saudi Arabia with a lone property mentioned in Oman. The question of course is what happened? Where are all the Middle East hotels […]
5-star hotels in different parts of the world…
Following my recent journey through Europe and the Middle East I noticed the many different hotel standards that all claimed to be either 5-star or 4-star superior… For the trained or untrained eye, it was painful to see what so-called 5-star hotels have become over the years; something regular travellers have been rightly whinging about […]
Observations of an Independent Holiday Traveller…Part 2
Having finished my sojourn through Europe with various short or long stays and a good taste of the hospitality industry on the continent I was ready to start my tour through the Middle East beginning in Amman. I had always had a soft spot for Amman as it was instrumental in the direction my life […]
Passion versus Profit?
When coming back from a well-deserved holiday, have you ever asked yourself, what are the moments you remember and what are the moments you would rather forget? Let’s start with the memorable moments: A reasonably pleasant flight on Qantas. Very little can go wrong with a self check-in these days – contact with humans is […]