Paying Attention To Hotel Fire Safety

Over the years, I’ve had to evacuate a hotel because of fire alarms at least three times that I can remember. None of those incidents involved a serious fire — the causes were along the lines of overheated coffeemakers —  but it might have made me think.

It didn’t, really. My fire safety precautions have consisted only of locating the stairways when I stay on a high floor and always having a small flashlight in my luggage.  I’ve never tried to find out when choosing or checking into a hotel whether it has sprinklers in the guest rooms. But after reading a recent Associated Press story on the subject, I’m going to pay a lot more attention to that detail.

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Midtown Manhattan Hotel: $129

Travelzoo has a very nice deal this summer on what looks like a pretty decent hotel in midtown Manhattan. The $129 rate for the Hotel Thirty Thirty comes out to $152 with all taxes, a very low rate indeed for midtown.

This rate must be booked by June 9 for stays between July 1 and Sept. 6, with some last-minute availability between June 17 and June 30. It applies Sunday through Thursday.

The reviews on Tripadvisor are generally favorable but include some complaints about the size of the rooms and the quality of the service. (Welcome to New York.) Keep in mind that those travelers reported paying, on average, twice as much as this special rate.

Waste Not The Hotel Toiletries

There’s some buzz gathering around an operation called Clean the World that collects leftover soap and shampoo from hotels and reprocesses them.

The recycled soap products are distributed to homeless shelters in the United States and to needy people in poor countries, where soap can save lives by halting the spread of infectious diseases.

You can help by sending leftover soap products you’ve accumulated, donating money and asking hotels to participate in the recycling program. The Clean the World Web site has more details.

Hotels Showing Wear And Tear

For the past 18 months or so I’ve been observing, in a clinical way, the effect of the severe recession on hotels.

We’re staying right now in an upscale hotel in downtown San Diego. Our room is very clean and nicely furnished, but when we arrived a lamp bulb was hanging loose in its socket. The bathroom door is very thoroughly scuffed and scratched on the inside. The mini-bar had been removed.

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A Quirky Hotel List

Gamirasu Cave Hotel

HotelsCombined.com has released a list of the 10 quirkiest hotels in the world and, much to my surprise, it includes a hotel I’ve stayed in.

The Gamirasu Cave Hotel in Ayvali, Turkey, is third on the list. I didn’t really find it all that quirky when I stayed there in 2008, but these lists tend to be pretty subjective, anyway.

The rooms at the Gamirasu are dug into the soft rock of Cappadocia, where people have lived in caves for thousands of years. It’s a beautiful place and a great value, plus the breakfast buffet is fabulous. Quirky or not, I highly recommend it.

As for the Jumbo Hotel in a grounded 747 in Stockholm or the Alcatraz Hotel in a former jail in Kaiserslautern, Germany, I’ll let you know what I think if I ever get there.

Consumer Reports Dishes On Hotels

The June issue of Consumer Reports magazine has the results of an extensive reader survey on hotels.

The full results are available only to subscribers, but the Consumer Reports website has an interesting summary that’s available to non-subscribers.

Among the findings:

• Upscale chains continue to offer big promotional discounts
• Readers who reported bargaining with hotel staff for a lower rate said they were often successful at getting a discount
• Most budget hotel chains were rated a poor value, with the clear exception of the Microtel chain

The Value Of TripAdvisor

I’m preparing a presentation on the five most valuable Web sites for bargain travelers, and one of them is the hotel review site TripAdvisor.

I’m well aware of the controversy about the reliability of the reviews that TripAdvisor aggregates. No less an authority than Arthur Frommer has been leading the charge, criticizing TripAdvisor’s response to false reviews on its site. He and others, including travel ombudsman and blogger Chris Elliott, have raised reasonable questions about fraud and manipulation of reviews, questions that ought to be answered. 

And yet, despite these problems, TripAdvisor has accomplished something revolutionary. It has empowered the travel consumer to share experiences and to point the collective finger (whichever finger seems appropriate) at hotels that rip travelers off. The callous and casual exploitation of the stranger in town, an unfortunate tradition over the centuries, has been suddenly set back on its heels, thanks to the power of crowd-sourcing and the Internet. No fleabag hotel on this planet is safe from TripAdvisor.

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Hotel Rates Ready To Rise?

Nobody is  sure what the economy will do next, but the talk of recovery, however slow, seems to have the hotel industry feeling fairly encouraged.

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New York, New York In Las Vegas: $55

New York, New York on The Strip in Las Vegas has rooms at $55 a night on limited dates through the end of the year.

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Google Maps Testing Hotel Rate Displays

Google is testing a feature that lists the rates of hotels next to their listings in Google Maps, according to the TechCrunch blog. Reviews are already linked into listings, so this adds another layor of information. I imagine we’ll see the same technology on GPS units in a few years.