Spendthrift Shoestring

Miami: New Year's Eve Scenes

I'm in Miami with Matt. Buenos Aires, Asunción, and Montevideo are on deck. Scenes from today:

Design District with airplane.

Design District facade.

Haulover Beach, mid-afternoon.

Some Reflections on NYC's Budget-Friendly Hotel Scene

This fall, I visited scores of budget and midrange hotels in New York City for EuroCheapo. Though I never set out to become an expert on hotels of whatever type, I realize that I have become just that along the way. My ability to distinguish between the good and the bad in the generally maligned budget and midrange hotel categories has emerged as a subspecialization.

I have reviewed hotels for EuroCheapo in Athens, Barcelona, Berlin, Bratislava, Dublin, Krakow, London, Munich, Rome, Stockholm, and now New York. For Rough Guides and koucou, among others, I have reviewed hotels in a range of Caribbean territories. In every location, there are interesting things to be learned about the social and cultural dynamics of places in addition to the more direct objective of assessing hotels. The hotel reviewing process, in other words, yields all sorts of other observations on local culture, migration patterns, and hotel management styles at a cultural level.

My benchmark for proprietor friendliness (and general hotel reviewer bliss) is Athens, where a typical day on the job would bring with it perhaps a dozen invitations to a coffee and long conversations about properties. Owners are usually on-site or easily accessible in Athens, or there are long-term sales managers in the office who are empowered to speak knowledgeably about rooms, clientele base, renovation dates, and other defining hallmarks.

New York is not Athens. On most occasions, showing up at a hotel and asking for a manager or someone in sales engenders panic among desk staff and a complete unwillingness to field even the simplest questions thereafter. New York hotels are top-down affairs, places where sales managers and PR teams filter access in a careful and measured manner. (I finally began to get better results when I stopped asking at reception desks for someone in management and simply introduced myself and explained that I was updating a hotel guide.) Most receptionists in New York, it would appear, have been given strict instructions not to communicate with anyone but guests about their places of employ. This is unfortunate, as it implies insecurity. As a hotel reviewer, I want to visit bold properties staffed by people who are proud of their rooms and services, no matter how modest they may be. The simplest and most basic hotel can be wonderful, after all.

There are some very good budget and midrange hotels in New York, though not as many as there should be. I closed my reviewing gig thinking that someone could make an absolute killing by setting up a hotel in New York that charges a simple, transparent nightly rate of $125 or $150 a night for simple but beautifully decorated double rooms. Said hotel would need to fight against the aesthetic objective of hotel chain standardization with simple, attractive, and durable decor and fixtures. There could be as few as two perks on tap: free wi-fi and a well-trained barista at an espresso machine in the lobby. By selling rooms at a rate divorced from the market pricing imperative and by maintaining a standard that is beautiful and not anonymous, this fantasy budget hotel would always be completely full.

The market is wide-open. Hotels in New York are too expensive and all too often terribly bland and cookie-cutter in look. Some investors need to look at the budget tourist market as a potentially sophisticated one, not simply a lowest-common-denominator/anything-goes demographic of tourists who will accept any bone thrown their way.

Dominica's Election Season Redux

Yesterday Dominica voted in a general parliamentary election. According to this report, the ruling Labour Party took 17 of 21 seats, an increase of five seats over the results of the most recent general election in 2005.  (For a look at the pageantry surrounding the election, see my Intelligent Travel blog post from earlier this week.)

Here are some images of the campaign, which I snapped the first week of December.

Labour Party poster for Roseau Central candidate.

United Workers Party campaign posters, Roseau. 

Competing campaign signage. The question-mark on a blue background is a UWP hallmark. Beneath are some Labour Party posters and flags. Roseau.

Intelligent Travel: Election Season on Dominica

My post on the hubbub accompanying Dominica's upcoming election went up today on National Geographic Traveler's Intelligent Travel blog. I'll post some more election scene photos shortly.

Lo Bleu Hotel on the 101 Holidays Blog

Check out a tiny review of one of my favorite Caribbean hotels, Lô Bleu Hotel on Guadeloupe's Terre-de-Haut, on the 101 Holidays Blog.

Accounting for a Longish Absence

I have not, all appearances to the contrary, forsaken this blog. I have simply been concentrating on a range of other activities and have not found the time to publish posts over the last few weeks.

I'm in Dominica right now, researching a few stories for koucou and finding myself caught up in the political intrigue surrounding the country's upcoming election. Everyone seems ready and willing to talk about the local political scene. I have not had to expend much effort to learn a great deal. In addition to my koucou research, I'm working on a few posts for a great travel blog, to which I'll link once they have been published. 

Dominica is an amazingly wonderful place, densely and richly green. The mountains are blissfully untouched. Tomorrow I'll embark on a very serious hike, to Boiling Lake. I thought I was prepared for the hike until the film crew staying next door returned from their hike to Boiling Lake today with war stories and serious gashes. I'm hoping for the best.