TripAdvisor Abandons List of Dirtiest Hotels – NYTimes.com

EACH January in recent years, the online travel review site TripAdvisor.com has kicked up storms of publicity and protests by releasing its scathing lists of the “dirtiest hotels” in the world.

But not this year. TripAdvisor has abandoned the widely cited lists of the grungiest lodgings in various regions of the world, including the United States. “We want to stay more on the positive side, so we’ll continue to feature the best destinations, the top hotels,” said Stephen Kaufer, the chief executive. “We’re slicing and dicing the ‘best of’ in different ways this year, more than focusing on the negative.”

So that’s the end of annual collections of reviewer comments like these about various unfortunate properties that made previous world’s dirtiest lists such amusing reading (assuming you did not own any of the hotels in question): “Made me think of my own grave,’ ‘A level of filth and discomfort that mere neglect could never produce,’ ‘If Hell had a hotel it would be something like this.’ ”

The insults ranged from the hyperbolic if plausible “Dust so thick we could have knitted our own blanket.” to the clearly absurd “Chewing-tobacco spit oozing down the halls and corridors.”

As I note their passing, however, allow me to employ the same kind of sarcasm that characterized the lists: “Looks like snarky TripAdvisor pulls its punches, accentuates the positive, eliminates the negative, now that it has been spun off by Expedia as a separate publicly traded company and it feels competition from the new Google travel site breathing over its shoulder.”

via TripAdvisor Abandons List of Dirtiest Hotels – NYTimes.com.

Strange Random Bad Hotel Quote:

“I stayed in a really old hotel last night. They sent me a wake-up letter.” – Steven Wright (American Comedian, b.1955)

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• Around the World in 80 Drinks: Trip Advisor Food and Wine Rankings (lyke2drink.blogspot.com)
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• Hotel Max Seattle Awarded to TripAdvisor’s Top 10 Sexiest Hotels in the Country (prweb.com)
• Travel marketing: Why would Expedia announce verified reviews right after spinning off TripAdvisor? (5to9branding.com)
• Expedia, Inc. Completes Spin-off of TripAdvisor, Inc. (prnewswire.com)

Acropoclipse (Now)

Without doubt, the most beautiful images to come out of Athens in many months. The Total Lunar Eclipse of June 15th 2011, as captured by Elias Politis.

Strange Random Greece Quote:

“Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts / And eloquence.” – John Milton (English Poet, Historian and Scholar. Ranks second, only to Shakespeare, among English poets. 1608-1674)

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Too much seasonal spirit: Abu Dhabi hotel ‘regrets’ £7m Christmas tree

Image via Wikipedia

An Abu Dhabi luxury hotel that boasted an $11m / £7m Christmas tree decorated with gold and gems has admitted it may have taken the holiday spirit a bit too far.A statement from the Emirates Palace hotel said it regretted “attempts to overload” the Christmas tree tradition by adorning it with premium bling including gold, rubies, diamonds and other precious stones from a hotel jeweller.The tree was unveiled last week with full fanfare in a hotel that features its own gold bar vending machine and a one-week $1m package that includes private jet jaunts around the Middle East.

via Too much seasonal spirit: Abu Dhabi hotel ‘regrets’ £7m Christmas tree | World news | The Guardian.

Strange Random Christmas Tree Quote:

Never worry about the size of your Christmas tree. In the eyes of children, they are all 30 feet tall. – Larry Wilde, The Merry Book of Christmas

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• Abu Dhabi hotel regrets $11M Christmas ‘overload’ (hosted.ap.org)
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Plnnr.com – plan your perfect stay!

Most of us use the Internet nowadays for holidays, whether it’s for booking flights, hotels or just finding information about the place we’d like to visit.

So it’s no surprise to find new online services such as Plnnr, which can take your idea and turn it into a full city tour, complete with hotel booking and the flexibility to move at your own pace.

Step one is choosing your destination. At the moment, there are 10, including London; Dublin, Paris, Toronto, New York and ahem, Barcelona. Then choose your dates, the type of trip you’d like (with kids, cultural, best of), the intensity (from chilled to manic) and the luxury level (does anyone travel less than 5-star nowadays??) and press the button. Et voilà!

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This is what your plan looks like for a Best Of, Relaxed, 3-Star getaway in January in Barcelona. Each day’s itinerary is marked in a different colour, with the numbers of each sight explained in the left column. By clicking on the different options there, you can tell Plnnr that you’d like to spend more (or less) time visiting a specific area, that it’s a “must-see” or even that you’d like to miss it out altogether. Plnnr automatically updates your itinerary, moving visits to another slot on the same day or a different one where appropriate. If this still isn’t what you want, you can refine your requirements until you get the perfect plan. Definitely worth a try for your next break!

Here’s the video from the site explaining what Plnnr does:

Strange Random Holiday Quote:

A vacation is what you take when you can no longer take what you’ve been taking – Earl Wilson

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