Got plenty of business travel this summer? A family reunion that’s taking you across the country for two weeks in August? Have to book a hundred rooms for a graduation? This summer is great time to book hotel rooms among the Choice Hotels. They’re currently running a promotion where after three separate stays you’ll earn enough points to redeem a $50 cash card.
Choice Hotels are traditionally budget to moderate priced properties, so you don’t have to worry about breaking the bank when you reserve a room. Among the candidate properties are Comfort Inns, Comfort Suites, Cambria Suites, Sleep Inn, Qualty Inns, Clarions and those in the Ascend Collection, so you have plenty of flexibilty in your choices as well.
You can check out the properties and join Choice Priveleges, at choicehotels.com, where you’ll automatically start earning points towards your gift cards.
While strolling through the aisles of the local Bed Bath and Beyond yesterday (which is a bad idea this time of year), I came across this fantastic little ultrasonic humidifier.
The Air-O-Swiss “AOS 7146 TRAVEL” is a tiny box, with a water bottle screw thread on top. Instead of relying on a gallon sized water container, you simply attach a regular water bottle to the top of the unit, plug in the power adapter, and it instantly starts blowing out nice humid mist.
The humidity (or lack of) in most hotel rooms has always bothered me, and I’d often wake up in the middle of the night with a dry throat, so this device just went on my Christmas list.
The AOS 7146 costs $59.99, but most people will probably have a large stack of 20% off coupons for Bed Bath and Beyond lying around, bringing the price down to a very reasonable level.
The unit comes complete with an international power adapter with foreign plugs as well as a travel bag. At just 0.7lbs, it is small and light enough to accompany you on your next trip, and hopefully make things a little more comfortable. If you don’t have a store in your area, you can order it on the Bed Bath and Beyond web site,
With fierce competition in the travel market, websites are increasingly turning to gimmicks, tricks and guarantees to hook surfers into booking with them. Most frequent these days is the low price guarantee, where a particular airline or hotel chain will guarantee that their prices are the lowest — and if you find a lower fare they’ll either refund you the price of the booking or give you some sort of voucher.
In the case of most airlines, this is particularly useful because they control the supply and pricing of the tickets; therefore, obviously, their website has the lowest price. But the hotel industry hasn’t come as far. Their innumerable combinations of hotel rooms, rates, locations and discounts often create loopholes which one website will often miss in comparison to another.
So if you can find this lower fare and a third party website that guarantees that they have the “lowest prices”, you can book the cheaper fare, cry foul to that website and essentially get that room for free.
What sort of website would do that? Triprewards, for one has a best rate guarantee, and I’m told they’re quite disciplined about reading and responding to claims.
And how do find the cheapest rates out on the market? Well, I’d start at the Best Rate Guarantee blog, where a generous member of the travel community has an ongoing list of BRG valid deals. Make sure you read his introductory posts that tell you exactly how and when to book your hotel rooms, and you’ll be on your way to free rooms in no time!
Normally the New York Times isn’t on the receiving end of my rants about shoddy “travel trend” pieces. But I came across one from this weekend’s travel section that simply had to be cleared up.
Their story argues that hotel room prices across the world are surging: From New York to Asia, and just about every desirable destination in between, the prices of rooms – especially at hotels and resorts favored by luxury and business travelers – are expected to rise significantly, sometimes in the double digits, analysts say.
Wow, that’s probably the dictionary definition of over-generalization, when they try to extrapolate a few data points to, umm, the entire world. If you read the article, you’ll notice that they mainly talk about New York–over and over again. They also like to bring up India and New Delhi.
Of course, there are some places where they have it right, like Beijing, though that’s a gimme since they’re hosting the Olympics next summer, when demand will obviously be high for rooms. But I think it’s misleading and a disservice to travelers to be crying higher hotel prices–of course, I don’t think NYT‘s hotel advertisers will mind too much if the paper can convince everyone to just throw more money at the hospitality industry.
Hotel rooms and celebrities are often a bad combination; in fact, for some celebrities, the relationship between stardom and accommodation can be downright explosive. And that’s when hotel rooms get trashed.
Although destroying hotel rooms was once reserved solely for rock stars, their famous Hollywood counterparts have joined the club and now wreck havoc with comparable glee and abandon. In fact, according to Budget Travel’sTen Celebrity-Trashed Hotel Rooms, two actors have managed to crack the Top Ten–Lindsay Lohan for leaving a “pigpen” (including a bloody syringe) at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica, and Johnny Depp for causing $9,767 worth of damage at Manhattan’s Mark Hotel which, incidentally, he blamed on a crazed armadillo. Ironically enough, one of the other guests at the time was The Who’s Roger Daltrey (whose band mate Keith Moon also made the Top Ten list). Daltrey, however, wasn’t impressed, according to the Budget Travel article and gave poor Depp a lowly score of 1 on a scale of 10. “It took him so bloody long,” he later told People Magazine, “The Who could’ve done the job in one minute flat.”
Budget Travel writer Marc Spitz incorporates other pithy quotes and a healthy dose of humor in walking us through the handiwork of all ten nominees, carefully detailing the blood splattered walls, thrown TV sets (that’s Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones doing the honors in the video above), arson attempts, fecal surprises, shattered glass and other hotel room mishaps our favorite stars have left behind.
My favorite line: “The Who were subsequently banned from all Holiday Inns for life. Sadly for Moon, that would amount to only about 11 years.”