Virgin Atlantic

When you enter a Virgin Atlantic flight it's always party time :)

How a change in the light color (and good design) can change the experience!

Monocle covers Portugal again

Monocle loves Portugal, that's official! Again the lifestyle magazin focus on Portugal, this time with a 16 page Travel Guide with must-knows, city stops in Lisbon and Porto, Coastal tours, Rural retreats and essential experiences.

On the same edition, Sana hotels advertise on two pages their hotels in Portugal.

Reasons to be proud...

Choose your hotel room like a seat on a plane

Hilton honors members, and guests of London's Euston hotel, will be able to choose their room when booking their stay. Hotels are one step closer to airline companies 

The lousy service of luxury hotels

The world of luxury hotels is a mix of attempt to provide outstanding service and awkward policies and procedures that seem designed just to annoy the costumer.

One fine example was provided to me and for my personal amusement by Conrad Hotel in Dublin.

It is normal that these hotels do not include breakfast in their standard price, which I think it is a way of seeming to have more competitive ratings on internet bookings of this life. This is weird. When you stay at a hotel you normally want to have breakfast there, so you should have the chance to opt out, not to opt in.

Anyway, in this particular hotel they give me vouchers for breakfast, which are of a considerable size, and hand written. One for each day. I guess this is the replacement of having a computer linked to the central database where they can check if the guest is entitled to taste the fabulous delicacies of the breakfast buffet, which maybe seem to modern or too digital to some guests, I don’t know.

So, when you go to grab your bite in the morning, you are supposed to carry them, one for each day.  But if you don’t?  If you lost one, or left it in the room?

This happened to me this morning. With the vile intention of  trying to get past the breakfast receptionist and get to the food, I swore I had one of those vouchers. The waiter asked me twice, so I am pretty sure of my answer. Then, he said the he was going to check with reception. Then he suddenly interrupted my morning e-mail browsing to ask me if I would mind to purchase another breakfast voucher. Of course I told him for the third time: “I have a voucher, I just don’t have it with me”. He finally went away. I could imagine the reception clerk saying: “he’s lying, that miserable luxury guest. He doesn’t have one. Go and make him buy one before he swallows that poached egg!”.

In the end, I went back to my room after waiting for the packed morning elevator, just to find that rotten voucher smiling at me at the table. I went back to the restaurant and gave it to the waiter. He didn’t apologize. I was late, due to my need to have an impeccable reputation, but being able to walk past the reception and  held my head up high and thinking “I told you I have a voucher!” made it worth.

Although I am staying at a so-called luxury hotel, I am paying the price of lousy manual processes. I guess that’s why they charge so much.

What is more deplorable in the story is that many times these hotels say that they treat you like a king - unforgettable experience, forget the routine and all that crap - and then they treat you like a regular burglar. Not even a distinguished burglar, like those we used to meet in novels of the late XIX century. No. They don't treat you with finesse. They just ask for the money right away.

So, I guess that although I look for luxury hotels, I am not up to their standards.

Self Payment Machines

One of the things that really pisses me off when I am travelling are those shops where there is no one at the till and you have to do the payment yourself. You are led through a series of menus on the screen, where you have to scan your boarding pass, scan the product, sometimes weight the product, select payment mode, input card, and finally put the product on a bag. That is what someone was supposed to do and was doing until last week.

Shops started some years ago decreasing the level of service in an astounding way. They started to hire low paid employees, that basically knew very little about what they were selling. Then most of shops decided not to have employees that can assist you when you are shopping, they just wait at the counter for your payment. the level of information is minimum, even in tech shops. Sometimes you can find someone that is really knowledgeable, and then you find out that is there trying to sell some specific product, he is paid by the brand to that, so he is not really giving you independent advice.

Shopping has become a very unpleasant experience, in general. And now, finally companies are trying to get rid of the last human element in the shop. I don't buy that. When I realize that I have to do the payment myself, I just leave the goods there and walk out the shop.

Until the moment when I will be forced to do the payment myself, because there will no alternative left...