A Creative Way To Market In-Room Porn: No Malware! No Spyware! No Viruses!

by Dave Seminara on

The pretty young woman in a miniskirt on my TV screen had an interesting sales pitch that caught my attention.

“Access your in-room adult movie selections,” she purred. “Where there’s no spyware, no malware and no viruses!”

Here, on my television screen at an inn in Oregon, was proof positive that purveyors of in-room hotel porn are getting desperate. Given the choice between accessing porn for free on their computers or paying through the nose for it on pay-per-view, most randy hotel patrons are voting with their pocketbooks.

Indeed, LodgeNet, one of the companies that provides in-room entertainment options to a variety of major hotel chains, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection earlier this year; and, according to The New York Times, some of their competitors are also struggling. Meanwhile, some hotel chains, like Omni and Marriott, have gotten rid of in-room porn altogether.An industry expert cited by NBC News estimated that adult movies comprise 85 percent of the in-room entertainment revenues hotels collect, so the option to either market in-room porn more effectively or declare defeat and stake out the high moral ground, like Omni and Marriott, is clear.

I’m way too frugal to buy in-room movies, adult or otherwise, when I travel. If I want to watch a movie, I’ll stream something on Netflix, but that can be frustrating if the hotel has sketchy Wi-Fi. A story in the Times a few weeks ago speculated that hotels may move toward offering free low-speed Internet (thought it obviously won’t be called that) that will allow guests to send and receive e-mail but charge them for higher bandwidth access that will allow them to stream videos. One way or another, hotels will find a way to make money off of the guest’s desire to be entertained while on their premises.

What I would like from my in-room TV is the following: TV! When I hit the power button on the remote, I’m doing so because I want to watch TV. You know, the stuff that appears on the screen for free. But at many hotel chains, the default setting is the pay-per-view system and you have to figure out how to navigate out of it without accidentally authorizing something you’ll have to pay for. Often times, you just need to hit the channel up button, but sometimes you have to use the arrow buttons to navigate to the normal channel lineup. It’s not rocket science, but it is annoying.

Some hotels don’t have a pay-per-view system on default but they bring you directly to the hotel channel, which is normally used to tell you all about their overpriced steaks and massages and what not. I’d rather watch an infomercial for the Ab Lounge, thank you very much.

When I encountered the sultry vixen who promised me some adult fun with no spyware, malware or viruses, I was actually trying to find some cartoons for my kids. Really, I swear.

Is Farm-To-Hotel The Latest Lodging Trend?

by Anna Brones on


At home there’s the backyard garden, the local co-op farmers market and the stash of homemade pickles, but on the road, what’s a food-loving locavore to do? Track down a farm-to-hotel of course.

Hotel restaurants aren’t normally at the top of the list of a traveler’s places to eat, but sometimes time and efficiency leave you eating at the dining room on the first floor of wherever you’re staying, especially if you’re a business traveler. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that the food you’re getting comes from close by?

The New York Times reports that that’s exactly what some travelers are looking for.

At a visit last winter to the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel in Alberta, Canada, Ms. Driscoll said she was happy to discover a French fries dish called poutine, made with Alberta beef, that was served in the hotel’s lounge. “It gave me a unique feeling of a sense of place,” she said. “Local foods give you a great feeling of culture in a very short period of time, especially when you’re traveling on business.”

But it’s not just specialty and boutique hotels that are taking on the trend. Hyatt Hotels Corporation started a food initiative last May that requires that its chefs at about 120 hotels in the US, Canada and Caribbean incorporate at least five local ingredients in their menus; “local” being defined as within 50 miles of the hotel location.

That doesn’t make the entire restaurant a hub for locavores, but it’s certainly a start.

Via: New York Times

[Photo Credit: Anna Brones]

Hotel News We Noted: May 11, 2013

by McLean Robbins on

It’s the weekend, and you know that that means – it’s time for “Hotel News We Noted,” your annual wrap up of the best, wackiest and downright odd hotel news of the week. Spring has sprung in the hotel world, and we’re seeing tons of openings from major brands and boutique properties alike, as well as a slew of packages, many of which incentivize travelers to book early for summer stays. Time is running out for Memorial Day bookings in prime locations, but you’ll still find some great last-minute specials in major cities. Of course, don’t forget that Mother’s Day is this weekend. It’s not too late to snag a special at an area hotel there either – Saturday night stays and Sunday brunch offerings abound.

So without further ado, here’s the news you need for this week:

Crazy Hotel Package: Cockle Fishing (With your TOES!) at Hermitage Bay in Antigua
We’ve heard of hotels that will take guests out to “catch” their dinner, but never one quite like this. The ultra-luxe Hermitage Bay in Antigua will escort guests cockle fishing in in a hidden mangrove near the property. What is a cockle, you ask? It’s a small saltwater clam that lives in the deep, swampy mud. Desi, the Chef, and a local fisherman named Deon take guests hunting for the sweet things. Guests stand submerged to mid-thigh, calf-deep in mud, and find the clams by wiggling their toes! This sure brings new meaning to the idea of working for your home-cooked meal.

Haute Hotel Openings & Re-Openings
There are so many hotel openings this week and last, we simply can’t whittle down the list. Here are a few of the world’s most notable.

Located on the southwest coast of Bali, Starwood Le Méridien Bali Jimbaran is housed in a tranquil location that once was home to a small fishing village. The property features 119 guest rooms and suites that open around a unique 1,300-square-meter saltwater lagoon-style pool, as well as four restaurants and bars onsite. The hotel also features a six-room spa, a kids club and an exclusive rotating art program.

Istanbul is hot, hot, hot this year. The latest luxury property to hit the scene is Shangri-La Bosphorus, opening tomorrow. Located on the European side of the Bosphorus Strait, the hotel is housed in a former tobacco warehouse from the 1930s boasting a six-story Neo-Classical facade and a 350-year-old Sycamore tree in the courtyard. Expect a three-story Atrium, an 18-foot silk painting commissioned for the hotel, a CHI spa with eight private spa suites and the most spacious guest rooms in the city, ranging from 452 to 646 square feet, plus 17 suites with large private terraces.

In renovation news, the Hotel Gritti Palace in Venice is re-launching this year after a 15-month, $55 million restoration. Part of an overall $200+ million renovation for The Luxury Collection’s hotel’s in Europe, the newly revamped property features 61 rooms and 21 suites all carefully redone with an eye to the hotel’s historic beauty.

In New York City, the Langham Place has opened their first hotel in North America in the building that was The Setai Fifth Avenue. While at the start, the hotel, dubbed Langham Place Fifth Avenue, will look much the same, the well-known British name in hospitality brings an exciting new brand into New York City and a potential for further acclaim for the property. We’ll keep an eye out for more updates, which include the re-launch of the hotel’s spa in 2014 and a new bar, Measure, later this year.

Great Gift: Hotel Stories
Need a great gift for the luxury travel lover in your life? Luxury book publisher Assouline has just launched the latest in their collection of amazing coffee table books. Part of a partnership with The Luxury Collection, the book, called simply “Hotel Stories,” tells the tales of some of the world’s most famous hotels and their celebrity inhabitants.

Have a question, comment or hot hotel tip? Leave a note below or shoot us an email. We love mail!

[Image Credit: Hermitage Bay]

Travel-Related Websites That Really Engage Their Customers

by Chris Owen on

They all talk about it. “Like us on Facebook,” “Follow us on Twitter” and “Read our blog,” say travel-related websites selling everything from guidebooks to airline flights, gear and gum. Many give us little reason to like them, follow them or do anything other than buy their products on the way to the next online destination. But some travel seller sites actually do put some time and effort into creating a reason to visit other than to buy something.

The task of buying a hotel room for a night is easy to define. The short list of variables includes location, price and availability. Easy. Any number of search sites can gather that information, whirl it around and present viable options. Hotel.info does more. On their blog we find The Ultimate Guide To Cooking In Your Hotel Room that brings us unique, interesting content that in and of itself is a good reason to visit their site.A Different Kind Of Hotel Search
Providing step by step directions and video, Hotel.info teamed up with chef Nicola Whistle (the Secret Restaurant) to hack hotel room food. Using things commonly found in a hotel room, like a shower cap and iron, Chef Whistle cooks up some delicious dishes. Poached egg on toast with steamed asparagus for breakfast? Cooked in your hotel room? Yes indeed, it can be done and visiting hotel.info shows travelers exactly how to do it. Visitors to this site actually have a reason to like, follow and maybe check in with their #ultimatehotelguide hashtag from @hotelinfo_EN on Twitter from time to time.

Still, visitors would probably leave the Hotel.info site if their search results were not productive. Running a test search, Hotel.info vs. Kayak, Travelocity, Hotels.com, Expedia and others, results were similar but engagement was not. They all ask for our like and follow but only Hotel.info had additional content worth a look.

15,000 Things To Do On Planet Earth
Another travel buy site that earns our vote is Viator. This travel tour buy site caught our attention last year with their “Win Your Dream Travel Job” contest that had four winners tasked with traveling through 20 countries in 60 days in both North America and Europe, and documenting their adventures on camera. Viator also earned likes from cruise travelers, saving them money with Viator Shore Excursions offering more than 500 shore excursions in over 80 of the most popular ports around the globe. But more moving past simply selling tours, Viator engages site visitors with features like inviting travelers to submit photos and a rich library of tour-specific videos.

Selling a no-wait Skip The Line Guinness Storehouse Entrance Ticket for visitors to Dublin might be reason enough to buy. But Viator builds on that value with recent photos and a short video that is an accurate representation of the tour. A new Viator Tours & Activities App makes finding and booking activities for almost any given destination we might visit while traveling easy too, with more than 15,000 curated trip activities in hundreds of destinations including photos, video and reviews.

Clicking a “like” or “follow” button takes just a split second. But consider that click as a vote and be sure your vote counts. The best travel-related websites not only offer good pricing but come equipped with unique content that makes for a better overall value.

24 Almost Perfect Hours In San Francisco

by Dave Seminara on

A pair of hairy middle-aged Chia Pets are blasting Wham’s “Careless Whisper” from a new age boom box. A cluster of Latino immigrants is fishing and drinking cans of Tecate just steps away from a male paddleball player in a tight speedo with a Taliban-style beard and his long hair pulled in a Samurai-style bun. A teenager with a map of Bosnia and Herzegovina tattooed on his chest is enjoying a joint, not that anyone cares. A tattooed guy in a San Francisco Giants hat is playing the bongo drums while just up the beach near the rocky foot of the Golden Gate Bridge, a bevy of bronzed men, and one eccentric old lady with bright orange hair stroll the beach in the buff. There is no better place to drink in San Francisco’s delightful eccentricity than Baker Beach on a warm, sunny day.

Muddy Waters once referred to San Francisco in song as “mean old dirty Frisco,” but my experiences with the City by the Bay over the last two decades have always been significantly more positive. I’m always looking for an excuse to visit San Francisco, so when the opportunity arose to tag along with my wife on a business trip, I jumped at the chance. Here’s how I spent 24 hours in the city with two little boys, ages 3 and 5.9 p.m.

At first I was a little bummed when my wife informed me that the company she was visiting booked us into an Embassy Suites in South San Francisco (which bills itself as the birthplace of biotechnology) near the airport, but it turned out to be a good place to explore the city on a budget. They have free parking, a rare treat in these parts, and the place is less than a mile from Grand Avenue, which is filled with a variety of tempting and cheap ethnic restaurants, including Mexican, Thai, Brazilian, Mediterranean, Chinese and Vietnamese. I picked up takeout from a little place called Ben Tre Vietnamese Homestyle Cuisine and we feasted on BBQ Pork spring rolls and a tasty Garlic Noodle BBQ chicken dish ($20 all told) in the bedroom while our boys crashed on the pullout couch in the living room.

8 a.m.

I love how Pacific Standard Time can turn a night owl like me into a morning person literally overnight. I was up at 6 a.m. but felt like I’d slept in, and after a mediocre but free breakfast at the hotel, the boys and I were on the road heading to Golden Gate Park, San Francisco’s bucolic 1,000-acre green heaven. The rub with staying in the burbs is having to endure traffic heading into the city; but we made it to the park by 9 a.m. and easily snagged a free place to park right near the park’s century old Japanese Tea Garden.

It was a glorious day, sunny and warm and the park was filled with joggers and Chinese senior citizens taking their morning constitutionals. I paid $7 each to wander in the sumptuous Botanical and Japanese Tea Gardens (the Japanese Garden would have been free if it had been a Monday, Wednesday or Friday, when it’s free from 9-10 a.m) and then let the boys chase after birds and ducks on the walk around Stow Lake. At their urging, we also hit one of the park’s playgrounds but never made it to the carousel, the Buffalo Paddock or any of the parks other attractions because I was too eager to hit the beach.

11 a.m.

We drove through the park and scored another free parking spot just across the street from Ocean Beach, which on this Thursday morning was gloriously empty, save a smattering of sun worshippers and frolicking dogs. James, my 3-year-old, took his shoes off, dug his toes in the sand and did a little happy dance, gleefully running around the beach in circles. With the sun out and the waves crashing in, it was easy to relate.

1:30 p.m.

After spending an hour digging tunnels and making sand castles, my sons immediately crashed as soon as we got back in the car, so I took the opportunity to take a slow, circuitous drive through Richmond, the Presidio, Pacific Heights and Russian Hill en route to North Beach, a historically Italian-American neighborhood that was once the stomping ground of San Francisco’s Beat writers.

North Beach is one of my favorite neighborhoods in the country for strolling, but somehow I’d never been to Molinari Delicatessen, which has been on Columbus Avenue since 1896. It’s a gloriously old-school place – their house-made salami and sausage links hang from the ceiling and the intoxicating aroma of meat and cheese hits you the moment you step through the door. I had a sandwich with prosciutto, Molinari salami, provolone and sun dried tomatoes on fresh focaccia bread that was out of this world.

4:30 p.m.

After a little siesta/work break at the hotel, we picked up my wife and drove to Baker Beach, which has to be one of the most picturesque city beaches in the country. Aside from the unparalleled people watching described above, there is the view of the ocean, the hills in the distance and the Golden Gate Bridge. On an unseasonably warm day, it seemed like the whole city was there, some clothed, some naked, many with picnics, wine and beer.

6:30 p.m.

The view of the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance from Baker Beach is alluring but the vistas get even better a mile north along the Presidio Coastal Trail.

7:30 p.m.

Even after taking walks on the beach and on the Presidio Coastal Trail, I still struggled to finish the massive, delicious grilled fish burrito ($7.95) at Nick’s Crispy Tacos, which is located inside a lively bar called Rouge SF that has $4 pints during happy hour.

9:00 p.m.

We worked off our dinners with a long walk through North Beach, which was alive with panhandlers, nice looking people dining al fresco and lots of motorists circling the neighborhood looking for elusive parking spots. (It took me a half hour to find a spot myself.) And when it was time to eat again, we repaired to Gelateria Naia, a gelato place on Columbus Avenue. I loved the offbeat selection but we thought that the gelato, which has nearly 700 glowing reviews on Yelp was overrated. But if the worst thing you can say about a place is that your artisanal gelato wasn’t creamy enough, and that you have a “Careless Whisper” earworm, you are in a very special place indeed.

[Photo credits: Dave Seminara]