Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [10]
While dealing with packing decisions, we find amusement in researching and reserving hotels, a favorite parlor game of ours. For more than a decade at one point in our past, before we started teaching and writing about cooking for a living, we coauthored three accommodation guides in Houghton Mifflin’s Best Places to Stay series on Hawaii, Mexico, and the Caribbean. The job required us each year to see and review hundreds of hotels in all cost ranges and styles, providing us an intensive education in the hospitality business. From this practicum, we developed a strategy for selecting hotels and particular rooms for ourselves, an approach that’s hardly infallible but sometimes works spectacularly well.
Many people think that highly regarded top-end establishments offer the finest accommodations in a town. They frequently do if you can afford one of the better suites. Their regular rooms, from our observations, tend to be dully conventional. Instead, we usually opt for the best and priciest quarters at smaller, less prestigious local inns and hotels, which generally cost considerably less and often provide more space, better views, a truer sense of place, and greater romantic appeal. On this trip three expensive hotels attract us for short splurges along the way, each for a different reason, but mostly we reserve the prime rooms at more affordable places well located for our culinary sleuthing and grazing. The choices usually serve our needs—particularly the penthouse suite in Hong Kong at the YMCA—but also let us down occasionally, like in Sydney, where the guesthouse’s historic charm crowds out much hope of comfort.
The first step in the selection process for us is checking guidebook, magazine, and Internet recommendations. These sources always seem suspect to us because they frequently favor the new and trendy, sometimes act as disguised forms of advertising, and often reflect the views of unseasoned travelers or reviewers with entirely different agendas than ours. Still, they provide a useful starting point, particularly in identifying hotels praised by multiple people with varied perspectives. After narrowing the field of options, we investigate the prospects as fully as possible, going to their Web sites, doing Internet searches, locating them on maps.
How to book becomes the next consideration. In our Best Places to Stay days, hotel executives talked constantly about clueless customers booking through third-party agents such as reservation services and wholesalers, usually in an effort to get minor discounts. Maybe the guests saved a few dollars, but they also got the worst room available and impersonal service. The managers told us they rewarded patrons who dealt with their hotel directly, sometimes with better rates as well as preferred accommodations. So that’s what we do most of the time, relying on fax and e-mail contact in foreign countries.
The actual booking process turns out a little differently with each hotel on our trip. In the case of the three splurges, for example, we negotiate with the Oriental in Bangkok via fax; with the Amanpuri in Phuket through the Web site, which presents a fifty percent discount; and with the Taj Mahal in Mumbai through an Internet reservation service selling our ideal room package at a much better price than the hotel will provide. In Bali, all our communication is with the general manager herself, who gives us a great break. In Salvador, Brazil, our contact is an obsessive pen pusher who requires more paperwork from us than a bankruptcy court would demand.
Our itinerary also requires us to reserve rental cars in several spots and extra flights to destinations not served by ONEworld airlines. Enter Ingrid of Globe World