hotels

A Hotel Room When You Need It

August 26, 2015 By Jillian

Visiting a new city can be daunting, but even if it is familiar territory, you may still have some trouble finding a place to stay. While there are a few factors to consider when choosing a room, there’s no avoiding the fact that you need a place to call home base in your new city. Nine times out of ten, that’s going to be a hotel. For business travelers, having a quiet and comfortable place to work before your next meeting or conference is essential.

While standard hotel reservations work for travelers on longer trips, there’s a gap in availability for short-term options. Or at least, that was the case until recently. With new booking platforms like Hotels by Day, hotels are beginning to accommodate a broader range of options.

It’s a place to rest, freshen up, and stay productive for the afternoon. Whether you’re submitting a report, or putting together a presentation, you’re able to get it done more efficiently when you have the space and the resources to do so.

Day Stays – The Ultimate Solution

Regardless of where you’re headed, there are short stay options at some of the best hotel properties in cities around the world. From London to LA, hotel managers have started to recognize the opportunity to increase their booking revenue by offering guests day stay options. Those valuable guest rooms were going unoccupied for half the day, wasting tons of money on underutilized space.

You can easily find great hotels to book a short stay for the morning, mid-day, or afternoon. If you need more information about services and amenities, you can easily check out the website and browse the catalogue of properties. There’s a range of available options from budget-friendly accommodations to rooms and suites with luxury amenities.

These rooms give you the ability to book ahead of time and pay when you arrive at the hotel. You can easily make your reservation on an iOS or Android mobile device in just a few taps. In addition to that, you can cancel up to 24 hours prior to check-in, giving you complete flexibility in your traveling schedule.

What to Expect

Because hotel rooms with daytime booking options are a fairly new phenomenon, there is some uncertainly about what it actually entails. To help clarify things, day stay guests have access to the same range of property-wide amenities that an overnight guest of the hotel would enjoy. Whether that’s a rooftop pool, and on-site gym, room service, you name it, it’s available to day guests as well.

Obviously if you’re in town for business, you’re going to want to check ahead of time about availability for free Wi-Fi, work spaces in your room, a complimentary business center, and maybe on-site meeting rooms if you’re hosting clients. It never hurts to do a little due diligence beforehand so you know what to bring along with you on the trip, even if it’s just for a day.

With a day stay, you have a quiet place to work, all the amenities you need, and most importantly, a place to comfortably unwind in your down time.

3 Insane Hotels You Won’t Believe Are Out There

August 21, 2013 By Danny

According to Jake Bush, a Braun & Steidl hotel architect and developer, anyone who makes it their business to craft a hotel considers the following: “who is the guest, and why are they here”. With that in mind, it’s easy to understand why hotels across the board vary wildly—each one is trying to accommodate a specific kind of traveler.

For the most part, hotels are trying to cater to the business traveler, the luxury vacation traveler, and the budget-friendly traveler. However, there’s still another kind of traveler out there that some very unique and utterly strange hotels try to cater to, which is: the adventurous, experience-seeking, explorer.

These travelers want accommodations that are nearly the polar opposite of all the others—they want intrigue, danger, and a unique experience they can’t get anywhere else in the world—plus, they’re often willing to sacrifice a substantial amount of comfort, just for the experience. For every other kind of traveler, comfort is the last thing to be sacrificed when it comes to hotels. You can find out more at Accor, http://accorhotels.com.au/.

So, what kind of hotels does this kind of traveler frequent? Here’s my top picks for the world’s most insane, strange, and quirky hotels—some, you just won’t believe actually exist!

THE MIRRORCUBE | Location: Harads—Sweden

What is This Place? Well, The Mirrorcube is exactly what it sounds like, actually; it’s an extremely lightweight aluminum box (4x4x4 meters) with one-way mirrors for walls.

Accommodations: At most, it can only accommodate two guests at a time—imagine the waiting list! However, the interior—albeit small—provides a double bed, a living room space, a bathroom, and the exterior roof provides a nice roof-tip terrace.

What the Adventure-Traveler Loves: Per the description thus far, The Mirrorcube might not seem that interesting, but I haven’t mentioned yet that this mirrored box is actually camouflaged within a tree canopy, suspended above ground, around a tree trunk that shoots up through the center.

How the world do you get in?! By way of a rope bridge, connected to a neighboring tree!

Fun Fact: Since The Mirrorcube is located in a tree canopy and is made of mirrors, occupants are provided a 360-degree view of the surroundings. Sounds cool, right? Well, to local wildlife—specifically birds that might fly right into it—it’s not so cool. To handle this concern, all of the reflective glass is embedded with an ultraviolet color that only birds can see.

ICEHOTEL | Location: Jukkasjarvi—Sweden

What is This Place? Again, the name really is what it is—it’s an entire hotel made from snow and ice! Apparently, it’s the largest in the world, which sparked this comment from me: There’s more than one?!

Accommodations: While the beds—as well as the furniture and fixtures—are made of solid ice, they’re covered in the finest, warmest, furs. From what I understand there aren’t individual rooms; guests enjoy a more of a community experience—sharing body heat probably helps!

What the Adventure-Traveler Loves: It’s a hotel made of ice—what wouldn’t an adventure-seeker like about that?! With temperatures never rising above minus 5 degrees Celsius, adventure travelers will have a wonderful time walking around in snow pants and furs, while enjoying the company of other like-minded travelers.

Fun Fact: The ICEHOTEL only exists in the winter months—it melts after that! Every year, in November, the ICEHOTEL architects get together and design a whole new structure. Several hundred tons of ice is used in the process and it provides return guests a different experience every year!

KAROSTAS CIETUMS | Location: Leipaja—Latvia

What is This Place? It’s a prison—no, really, it’s actually a prison. Well, a former one, anyway.

Accommodations: It’s not terribly dressed up from being anything other than a prison. Guests sleep on grungy prison bunks, eat prison food, and even take a substantial amount of abuse from the guards—I’m assuming they limit that to verbal abuse. I think even the adventure-traveler draws the line at paying for physical abuse from the hotel staff.

What the Adventure-Traveler Loves: “A good hotel has got to be safe, clean, and have a good staff,” says our hotel developer Jake Bush, so the adventure-traveler loves that this hotel does all of the opposite. Karostas provides an experience—one that you can’t typically get unless you commit war crimes for a living.

Fun Fact: As a former military prison—constructed in 1905—Karostas imprisoned Stalin-era war criminals, revolutionists, and even KGB operatives.

All photos courtesy of the respective hotels.

Good, Bad, Ugly: Hotels

April 27, 2011 By Jillian

Anyone who has taken a weekend away knows that lodging can make or break your travel. Get a bad hotel and the entire experience can become unpleasant.

Good: Siem Reap, Cambodia

We took a chance and followed the advice of our hotelier in Phnom Penh. We booked with his buddy hotel, $25 a night for a triple. “It’s a bit outside of town,” he told us. “There’s free shuttle service.” Needless to say I wasn’t holding my breath but low and behold there was a tuk-tuk waiting for us at the mini-bus stop. We arrived at the hotel, which was gorgeous, but definitely a bit outside of the tourist area. It was quiet, peaceful and all together perfect. Looking off our balcony we saw rice fields and the luxurious swimming pool. The place was five star by backpacker standards, and the nicest place we’d had stayed in a long time. We were treated to a delicious made to order breakfast and spent the afternoons relaxing by the pool. When we booked a car for Siem Reap, our driver ended up being the owner and our car was a Lexus SUV. The place was heaven and it didn’t blow our budget!

Bad: Marsabit, Kenya

This would have taken the cake until we got to SE Asia. Off of what little backpacker trail there is in Africa, there exists only two kinds of accommodation: first class and…local. Driving on the “road” from Kenya to Ethiopia we pulled over in the largest town, Marsabit and headed to the local place recommended by the guidebook. The basic cement rooms had seen better days, and the electricity was intermittent. Sometimes there was “hot” water, but the only food available was abysmal. Excellent. Unfortunately the shared toilets were squatters and our friend was sick, a bad combination.

Ugly: Don Det, Laos

Our bus was late to arrive at the turn off for four thousand islands in Southern Laos. We arrived at the turn off after dark, meaning it was well past dark by the time we got to the dock and took the boat across to Don Det. We were frantically searching for a place to sleep in the dark. Thankfully the island was a bit deserted, but the accommodations were abysmal or outrageous. We spent one night in a cruddy little hut and “got the heck out” the next day. Unfortunately that also back fired and we ended up spending the next night (for free) in a crummy hotel room at the bus station. Dirty sheets, walls and floor. It was gross and the buses started rolling in at 6 a.m. We had of course arrived around three, because sometimes a four hour bus ride does take 12.

This column of ishouldlogoff.com aims to answer those questions that we always get asked. What was your favorite this, or your worst that. Every week we aim to highlight a new topic and will do so until we run out of ideas. If you have an idea for a Good-Bad-Ugly post, feel free to tell us in the comment section below or send us an email. To read all of them, click here.

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A Man, A Plan, A Canal… Panama

July 3, 2009 By Danny

The same thing forward, the same thing backward…a palindrome. We had finally made it to the Panama Canal.

Arriving in Panama City at the crack of dawn presented a new problem for us. Usually when we arrive at dawn we walk into a hotel and sleep for a couple more hours. This time we walked to six different hotels before finding one (which ended up being the most expensive thus far of the entire trip) that didn’t want to charge us by the hour. Things were really going well.

As one of Spain’s first settlements in the Americas, Panama City has tons of old Spanish ruins. To be honest, these weren’t particularly special but what was interesting was the museum at the ruins of Panama Viejo. This museum detailed the history of the Spanish Conquest and Panama’s importance 400 years ago. Spain used Panama to move goods into the Pacific ocean and to colonize the Pacific side of South America. Later burned by English privateers, Panama City was rebuilt and continued to act as method of commerce between Europe and the entire Pacific. It would be two hundred more years before the French would first begin working on a canal (in then Colombia) before Panama gained independence and allowed the US to do the job.

After two wrong buses we finally got to the the big ditch…also known as the Panama Canal.

The Pacific side of the canal has two sets of locks and one of these, the Miraflores Locks, has a museum and observation deck where we learned about the canal’s construction and watched two boats lowered simultaneously in two different locks. While watching I couldn’t help but think that with two locks side by side the water could be recycled between the locks, rather than require a constant flow of water from the lake. It seems however that the abundance of water here lead the canal designers to ignore this option and instead fill the locks with water from the lake and then send the same water out to sea. As part of the canal expansion plan, there are talks of building new locks (just like non-engineer Danny thought up) so that bigger boats will be able to use the canal. I’m sure the original locks were designed this way for a reason but that reason eludes me for now; anybody care to shed some light?

Panama City is by far the most modern city we’ve visited in Central America, yet it still has its quirks. City buses are still old US school buses and some even play music when the horn is honked…rather than the boring sound of a honking horn. Mostly though, it shopping malls and skyscrapers reminded us more of the USA than anywhere else we’d been so far.