Cultured Views

I need a holiday…

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If any of you ever get the crazy idea of going into the hotel business for yourself then the first person you must speak to is me - because I will do my best to talk you out of it.

Being your own boss can be a great thing - I have never been good at answering to other people, always prefering to do things my way - but the work is relentless and hard with very little chance for a break yourself.

Spending my time over the busy past few months ensuring other people have a nice holiday has left me needing one myself and we are looking around right now at where to go and what to do. I am not one for lying on a beach all day and doing nothing; I like a nice mix of sightseeing and shopping as well as lying around doing a little bit of nothing thrown in. Right now we like the look of one of those European cruises which sail around the fjiords or the along the Rhine - I have seen enough of the Med to last me a lifetime so now I am more in favour of some stunning alpine scenery.

Stay tuned!

Popularity: 9% [?]

In-flight reading

I have recently returned from a few days abroad, nothing to do with any holiday though, more an urgent family matter. By the way, I can highly recommend Aer Lingus to any of you nervous flyers out there - wonderful airline, nice solid planes.

As I am a nervy flyer at the best of times I always take something to occupy my mind and reading is the best way for me to do that; once I am into a book or magazine I forget I am up above the clouds and I actually start to enjoy the flight. What interested me was those airline shopping catalogues they put in the seats which allow to purchase dutyfree goodies during the flight.

They are really quite fascinating reading these days! no longer just cheap cigarettes, booze and perfume but also health articles on things such as diet and exercise to even advice on how to get rid of acne!

Back to the perfume though; I desperately wanted the new Gucci fragrance but even with a 20% reduction it was still too dear. Oh well…one more addition for my Xmas wish list

Popularity: 8% [?]

Hotel owners - what language should you speak…?

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a facility, even one very much with tongue-in-cheek, for hotel owners to rate their guests individually just as the guests are able to rate hotels?

I think it would be wonderful. What categories could we use:

* attitude

* in-room cleanliness (taking in those who cannot work out what a toilet flush is for - or a waste bin for that matter)

* behaviour/table manners in dining room

* friendliness/consideration towards other guests

“Yes”, I can hear you say, wouldn’t it be fun…

That last point though is what I particularly would like to be able to rate some guests on - and I have to admit I would be brutal in this regard. How some guests treat other guests can be quite surprising - especially when the some guests are natives of the country the hotel is in and the other guests are those dreaded foreigners.

Take France for example. We are noticing an increasing number of French guests who seem quite affronted when they encounter fellow guests who do not speak French - and naturally - because those other guests are not French! in fact they are even going to the trouble of registering complaints about it…

I accept that the French basically do not travel that widely outside of France, if at all, so some of them are not used to people of other nationalities. They arrive at a little hotel somewhere in their beloved France and of course expect to greeted in their own language - which they are, maybe not absolutely fluently - but their language all the same. But what puzzles me is why on earth they object to their hosts greeting other guests in the language those other guests speak…?

Why should the host rattle off a barrage of French to a Spanish couple when the host can speak fluent Spanish and thus communicate more politely and amiably with them…? why would the hosts deliberately make communication with their American guests impossible by speaking in French to them when both they, and you, are native English speakers…?

The one thing we love about this job is clearly obvious during breakfast times when all our guests are eating in the dining room; a variety of nationalities - Italian, English, Dutch, German, Spanish and even Slovakian - and all chatting away between themselves in their own native tongues, a nice mix of cultures and languages. And in the middle of them all sits a French couple offended that they are doing so…

Certainly when we go on holiday we chat in english between ourselves and have some fun attempting the local lingo with the ‘natives’. But - and I wish that some French would learn this - it is just not practical, nor at all necessary, to expect your guests to be anything other than who they are. It is where they come from that makes them so interesting.

Popularity: 21% [?]