Category service
I Want to Speak to the Manager!
On the internet nothing ever ends it seems, so a complaint letter written to a New York hotel dating back to a stay in 2004 came across my screen a couple of weeks ago. The apparently genuine letter was written by a disgruntled guest of the Hudson Hotel in New York. It hilariously details his […]
Sustainability in The Hospitality Industry – Part 5
While contemplating a follow up to my previous articles about sustainability, I realized that in the past year the world has significantly changed and with it, the way hotels operate. A good example was my recent stay between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. I took my chances during the holiday break to travel domestically in […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Elite Hotelier 
The (Re) – Emergence of the Takeaway…
It is widely acknowledged that the recent global pandemic has been deeply damaging to the hospitality industry, but out of that cauldron of despair there were a few positives. It brought out the creative streak in many independent hospitality professionals operating small or family businesses and perhaps showed a way forward for the wider hospitality […]