World Hotel Prices are Crazy (Conspicuous Consumption Edition)

Having worked on the front-lines of the hotel industry, and having done my share of world travel, I fully realize that world hotel prices can be rather insane. A flea-ridden hovel in mid-town Manhattan can go for $100 per night while in other world cities one can get a 3 or even 4 star hotel for a small fraction of that price. 

Hotels are also excellent rational predictors of financial trends. An unsold hotel room is worth less than nothing. If the room is empty the hotel is still paying for heat and air-conditioning and loan payments on the construction costs. Staff must be trained and available. While the restaurants and bars -- which are necessary to attract visitors to fill those empty rooms -- must be staffed and ready when someone wanders in the street.

Rack rates at the front desk are always flexible downwards if there are empty rooms. You would be amazed what a discount you can get in a major hotel when you stand there with cash in hand a few hours after the expected the big bus tour just got cancelled. The same rates are always flexible in an upward direction if it is Saturday night during the big football weekend or a big trade show is in town.

 After a week of reading how Russian billionaires are having to start keeping careful watch over their millions, and how thousands of jobs are disappearing in world financial centres; and after a week where I spent hours watching my own personal investments hit the tank; and a week when every publication and politician is making dire warnings of doom; and during a month when world commodity prices have taken a dive; I sit and read predictions of insanely high price increases. The first article that I read was a Robert Hughes declaration that the new emperor of art isn't wearing any new clothes at all. (In case you weren't paying attention, people are paying millions of dollars for pickled sharks and cows as long as some guy named Damien Hirst declares that what they are buying is 'ART'. And the darn things are starting to rot!). 

 Then I read about the opening of the new Atlantis Hotel on Dubai's Palm Jumeirah island. The darn thing has more than 1500 rooms and it cost a million dollars per room to build. This is in a city with practically no historic sites, where drinking of alcohol is highly discouraged and gambling is banned. So what kind of market are they building this hotel in and who do they expect to visit? 

 That got me poking around in Expedia.com. (The following prices are all in US Dollars and refer to a week in late October this year). Dubai now has 53 Five Star hotels! Many of them are offering rooms for 40 percent lower than the $650 minimum asking price at the new Atlantis. Obviously this place was not opened as an investment. It is no more of investment than a pickled shark in a tank is either an investment or art. What about the rivals in other world cities? Well here are some quotes for one person for that same week in October:

• The Plaza in New York $812 (one of just 5 Five-Star hotels in New York)
• Trump International $515 (one of 2 Five-Star hotels in Chicago)
• Trump International $212 (one of 5 Five-Star hotels in Las Vegas)
• Hotel Scribe Paris $472 (one of 5 Five-Star hotels in Paris)
• Royal Garden Hotel $248 (one of 52 Five-Star hotels in London)
• Conrad Hotel $480 (one of 4 Five-Star hotels in Tokyo)
• Mandarin Oriental $348 (one of 11 Five-Star hotels in Hong Kong)
• Mandarin Oriental $280 (one of 8 Five-Star hotels in Singapore)
• The Peninsula $283 (one of 8 Five-Star hotels in Bangkok)
• Venus Beach Hotel $107 (a Five-Star hotel in Paphos, Cyprus)

So these hotel-builders in Dubai think that they can fill up 53 Five-Star hotels at $600 per night in a city of about 100,000 citizens and a million guest workers? Are the local Arabs going to spend their entire lives staying in these places or do the owners really expect to receive the millions of millionaire tourists that would be required to make these baubles pay for themselves? In case anyone other than myself was wondering, this is what one can find if you go down a few steps in comfort that same week in October:

• Two-Star: Hotel Swagat Palace $9 ($17 air-conditioned) in Delhi (price is apparently not a misprint)
• Three Star: Puri Dalem Sanur Hotel $30 on Sanur Beach in Bali
• Three Star: Jin Jiang East Asia Hotel $38 in Shanghai (I once stayed across the street from this one)
• Three Star: President Hotel $44 in Cairo, Egypt
• Four Star: Swiss Belhotel Plaza $113 in Kuwait City, Kuwait
• Four Star: Le Meridien Commodore $104 in Beirut, Lebanon
• Four Star: Sun N Sand $100 in Goa, India

Apparently they don't believe in market research in the Middle East and simply order up the number of hotels, the size and quality that looks good. It is just a game of monopoly. Just like they order automobiles, buy military weapons or building new factories and cities.

RoadsideAmerica.com Roadside Attractions

I have been having fun the last few months submitting entries to the RoadSideAmerica web site. (If you try RoadsideCanada.com you are directed to the web site for the Big Beaver so I had to settle for Roadside America). 

Their web site is good because they appreciate the quirky side of life. Here in Edmonton we might have North America's largest shopping mall, some massive multi-billion dollar oil refineries, a wonderful park system, a classy university and an excellent LRT transit system. But for RoadsideAmerica the city is mainly famous for a big boot! 

So far they have added my photos for these attractions: 

St Paul Alberta's UFO Landing Pad 

World's Largest Mallard Duck in Andrew, 

Alberta Giant Turkey in La Riviere, 

Manitoba Giant Buffalo in Wainwright, 

Alberta Suzie the Giant Softball in Chauvin, 

Alberta Giant Bunnock in Macklin, 

Saskatchewan Giant Baseball Bat in Edmonton, 

Alberta Giant Boot in Edmonton, Alberta 

World's Largest Sausage in Mundare, Alberta 

I have made several more submissions lately that will take some time before showing up.

Alberta, BC and the Yellowhead

Wow that has been a long pause between blog updates, hasn't it? I have been a busy man but blogging has not been one of my activities. 

I moved in November, 2007 to Edmonton Alberta for a software job that only lasted three months. In the meantime this did give another chance to explore some icy and snowy roads as I got everything packed away, sold and or moved to Edmonton. I ended up driving the 2500 km round trip to Surrey BC twice since I moved here. 

The trip down at Christmas time was especially hairy. North of Kamloops I must have seen a dozen vehicles off the road in just an hour or two. (In the first photo on the right those black portions of the road are covered in very slippery ice). It is hard to believe that I hitch-hiked that lonely road so many times. Thank god for winter snow tires! 

On the way to the coast at Easter -- when I did the final cleanup after selling my mobile home there -- I screeched to a halt near Jasper town site to take pictures of the elk feeding beside the highway. Visitors always sees elk in Jasper Park in the winter though they are much rarer in the summer when the tourists are around. But this is the first time that I have seen close to 50 all in one location.

On the return from that trip I got this nice mountain view west of Banff near the BC border. Yet another boring mountain photo but they are so easy to take in the Rockies when the weather is good. 

I have taken a few local trips near Edmonton and posted a lot of the photos on my NotSorry.com web site. I am particularly proud of my Ukrainian church photos from this area. [2020 Note: No photos on that saved version. Flickr versions are here]. So now I am making my summer travel plans. Perhaps someplace local in July and then a long range trip in late August. 

I am leaning towards going all the way to Ontario, NY state and perhaps even the New Jersey shore and Philadelphia. 

I bought a little Trillium camping trailer this past spring and am looking forward to the trip. I recently added brakes to the trailer and did the trailer controller installation myself. (Would you believe that the thieves around here wanted $400 installation fee for a job that took non-mechanical me just 2 hours?) I have making spreadsheets and studying Google maps. I am afraid that travel is no longer something that should be done casually without planning. The average price of gasoline in Canada this summer is near $1.40 litre and about $1.08 litre in the USA. Plus the trailer adds nearly a 50% penalty to the amount of fuel used. So I do not think that this is something that I will be doing every summer!

Northern BC and Totem Poles

Most of the past year has been spent close to home but there was one big exception. In early June I finally drove into the far north of British Columbia. I have often visited the center or BC but this was my first time driving up the Alaska Highway to the Yukon. I took a lot of photos and put a many of them online. 

After my trip I added more than 10 pages to my web site. You can access them at my Northern BC and Totem Poles index pages. The Alaska Highway drive was nice and I saw some great animals posing beside the highway. I was reminded once again just how big and empty my home province is. British Columbia is bigger than the combined area of California, Oregon and Washington states. The surprise and highlight though was the drive from Watson Lake south to Kitwanga and Stewart. The population was sparse, the weather was great and the mountains were simply awesome. I was constantly stopping in the middle of the to take photos. I think that the results were impressive. 

I also spent a couple days driving around the totem pole villages of the Kispiox, Bulkley and Skeena River valleys. Each town has an impressive collection of totems. Each town has a different style and manner of displaying their cultural heritage. So far I have only created 'under construction' pages to hold the results. 

I was lucky with the weather on most of my trip. I once worked in Kitwanga and I know just how dreary the weather can be in those mountain valleys. 

I am still doing research on the local totems. One of the best places that I have found on the net is from Sweden! The Cathedral Grove web site holds to some strange mystical concepts about large trees but they do an excellent job on BC totem poles.

Travel without immersion

I often think that travel was more fun just a few decades ago. At the time we did not realize just how lucky we were. Flights were certainly more expensive in real terms and fewer people travelled. I do think though that we have given up an awful lot. We can now travel with more safety and perhaps more fun upon arrival. The actual act of travel is now more isolating. It is much easier now to travel and never leave one's home comfort zone. 

 Some of my perception is due to my loss of innocence. 

In the seventies there were plenty of hijackings but I did not hesitate to fly when I got the chance. Few of the hijackings seemed to involve many lives lost. In any case, we did not have global 24 cable news to pound the stories into our brains. While there were some bad plane crashes we never saw History Channel documentaries illustrating the failings of pilots, aircraft maintenance and government incompetence. There were more than a handful of serial killers cruising the highways looking for their next victim but I rarely worried about my hitchhiking safety. I just did not know any better. When I was younger we might read about the horrible excesses of communist governments and African dictators such as Idi Amin but no one was producing Hollywood films about it all. If we heard about Iran the story was to glorify the wonderful jewellery and palaces of the Shah. Excesses in Cambodia and Burma where hidden in the smoke screen of the Vietnam conflict. 

Flexible plane tickets and stopovers 

When I first travelled across the Pacific I had an open ticket. It was possible to change the route and dates almost at will as long as there were seats available. Between Vancouver, Canada and Sydney, Australia I made stopovers in Honolulu, Pago Pago, Apia, Nadi, Auckland and Wellington. Of course one can still do such a trip but I suspect that the fare would be several times the more direct no stopover fare. 

When I first travelled across Canada for Expo 67 in Montreal we took the train. It was a great way to see the country and we met people from all across the country. It was educational for me to see how other travellers were thrilled to be in the mountains that I see daily. 

Travellers nowadays miss much of that thrill and sense of the country. Flying the red eye flight to the East coast one has no sense of actually being in Canada rather than a completely different land. One see so much more when travelling at ground level. 

Today's travel is much more like staying at home. 

Some things, such as cheap phone calls and international news have made foreign travel easier. I fear though that they also make it easier for people to travel without actually being immersed in the local culture. In the mid seventies when I travelled for months across Asia I only made one phone call home. It involved booking a time at the big city post office for my three minute call. The cost was high and confusion was abundant. 

For months at a time the only news that I got from Canada was a few mentions in the family letters waiting at Poste Restante. Modern tourist can talk daily on the Internet, watch CNN in their air conditioned hotel rooms and have the New York Times delivered to their rooms. I clearly remember sitting in a cheap Queensland hotel room listening to the local radio. They were switching between numerous locations around Eastern Australia as they played the daily horse raising results. I was amazed that they could bring so many diverse locations into one program. 

By 1984 I was able to stay up late in my rental apartment and catch the CNN Headline News from North America. The downside of all this news and information is that it is easy to travel without getting at all immersed in the local culture. If a Japanese tourist visits Vancouver and watches Japanese TV and reads Japanese newspapers and talks to Japanese tour guides can they say that they have really seen Canada?

French Trip 1969 web page -- London to Paris to the Moon

While I did many early travels with my family; in the summer of 1969 I went off to Europe without the parents. I certainly had companions but little adult supervision. We managed to have an awful lot of fun. 

This was a school trip organized here in Vancouver. I was a student at King George Secondary in Vancouver. Among other subjects I was taking high school French language lessons. A few of us were offered the chance for a summer month in England and France. I saved my newspaper delivery earnings, talked my father into making a contribution, and then fly off to Europe. I have created a new web page with photos of my 1969 Trip at www.NotSorry.com/travel-france-1969.asp. There was about 20 students and a couple of female teachers. Most students were from University Hill or Point Grey high schools in Vancouver. I think that we were all 15 or 16 years old.

The plan after flying to Heathrow Airport was to travel to Paris quickly and spend two weeks of French Lessons. Then we would be off to the French Riviera -- La Cote d'Azur -- after a tour of the Loire and Avignon. Finally it was a long slog across France for a couple nights in London before flying home. We travelled by bus and train and ferry. We stayed at school dorms and university hostels. 

The Trip Out

From Vancouver it is a long overnight flight across Greenland to London. From there it was another long day trip to Paris. Due to a Channel ferry delay we missed our train connection to Paris. I remember spending considerable time at the French Immigration office at Calais. The delay meant that most of us stood up all the way on a crowded train. We arrived exhausted at our suburban school dormitory after midnight.

Paris Streets and Museums 

The next morning was early wakeup time to head to the Champs-Élysées for a rather boring Bastille Day parade. There was a lot of military units, just a couple bands and few horses. There was a very big crowd though. They must have been 12 rows deep on the sidewalk. 

That night -- or perhaps the next -- we stayed out late to attend an outdoor Renaissance era music and dance concert beside one of the Parisien boulevards. The thing that we found the funniest was that they used original costumes complete with tears and worn patches. They must have been three hundred years old. The music was deadly serious and we were exhausted. The dancers never cracked a smile and the pace was glacial. After we left -- we couldn't wait until the end -- we rolled out on to sidewalk and laughed for 20 minutes. This was definitely one of the funniest events of my young life.

We had lessons from a French instructor named something like Mr. Ligne. He kept us entertained with his accent acquired in England we kept him with our Canadian hijinks. 

 We visited a number of museums. I loved the Louvre. The Victoire de Samothrace remains a personal favourite. What a great setting! I took my pictures with a Polaroid camera. Some of the detail is missing but it did capture interesting colours. We sang on the bus and travelled through the hot summer rains. We drank a lot of cheap wine and some Spanish students taught us about Sangria and Spanish dancing. 

 It was a great summer. I have returned to Paris several more times and I have some great memories. But the funniest and most fun ones were from the summer of '69.

New places that I simply have to visit

I have been thinking this past winter about places that I need to visit. Of course there are a large number of places where I would love to return. It is interesting and sometimes shocking to see the changes and meet old friends again. There are many other places where I could drop by and enjoy discovering. Today though I wanted to write about the small number of places that I have not seen but I simply must visit before I get too old to travel. 

 I have decided that this must-see visit list can be broken down to three areas: (1) Angkor Wat When I left Vancouver in 1974 I had a one way ticket that lead across the Pacific to Australia and Thailand. I planned a few weeks in Australia and a few days in Indonesia. My ticket ended in Bangkok but included a side trip to Siem Reap in Cambodia. I ended up spending at least two months in Australia and two months sailing from Bali to Singapore. While I was sailing the South China sea we listened on our shortwave radio. We heard the news about the fall of Saigon and I ended up canceling my trip to Cambodia.
 This past winter I have been reading a lot about travel in Cambodia. It seems that now is the time to go. There have been some great bargains on travel to Bangkok recently; and improving roads and tourist facilities have made the overland travel seem possible and interesting. At the same time, it looks like intense foreign investment is poised to turn the Cambodian coast into the next huge Cancun or Phuket in the next few years.
 [2020 Update: I finally got to Cambodia three years ago and it was marvelous. My Flickr photos are found here.]   

(2) Florence and Rome, Italy I have seen a bit of Italy but only a few hours in the far north. In the summer of 1975 I hitchhiked from Greece to France. I got the best ride of my life but it involved a 48 hour drive across Yugoslavia, Italy and Southern France. I clearly remember driving down tree lined secondary highways in an evening drive past the turnoff to Venice. I did not turn off.
 Many years, in 2000, I did a one night side trip to Milan. So I hope one day to return and taste some of the artistic and historic wonders of Italy. As visitors to my web pages know, I have enjoyed visiting many art galleries and seeing some fine art. I understand that Florence has some of the best. And Rome of course is the home of so much of what we consider high culture.
[2020 Update: I made a big Italy trip back in October 2010. Flickr photos are here.]  

(3) Giza and the Pyramids What can I say. Doesn't every tourist want to see the pyramids and visit King Tut's tomb? I must say though I was somewhat disappointed to recently discover that you can no longer climb on the Pyramids. I understand the reasoning but somehow that seemed the best reason to visit. I imagine climbing to the top and seeing the sun set over Cairo would be wonderful.
[2020 Update: Realizing that I can't climb the Pyramids dropped them from the heights of my Must See list].

Noumea: things have changed

This blog is intended to create a dialog about all aspects of tourism and travel. I wanted to write about some of the places that I have visited. I also want to write about some of the places where I will go in the future. I want to write about how travel, tourism and adventure has changed. And finally, I wanted to wanted to start a dialog. 

Please add to the comments. I would love to read and share the thoughts of others. 

So I start with Nouméa. It is a good place to start because it illustrates a few trends. (Also, since I spent less than an hour there I can dash this off quickly!) The theme today is that ones life can have small moments full of time and meaning. I was flying from Singapore to Sydney -- or was it NZ? -- in 1983 or 84. The point is that the details fade but the feeling remains. The plane stopped for refueling at Nouméa airport. We all piled off for our hour in the airport lounge. It was only about 50 metres from the steps of the waiting jet. A small group stopped in the lounge, we told our life's stories, we discussed the future and shared a few laughs. We made friends for life and then we split to never meet again. Travel brings up these short and intense friendships. Things like that never seem to happen with the same intensity at home. 

 Another theme is how things change. Is there any airport in the world where security remains free? Especially in New Caledonia where there has been so much turmoil? It was fun to travel when people could feel safe and security was much less unobtrusive. Also in the days that jets are taking 13 hour flights, smaller places like Nouméa and Samoa are overflown.
 Fewer stopovers means more tourists in the main destinations while some smaller locations languish. This can be good.

[2020 Note: That Noumea stop was in November 1983 while traveling Sydney to NZ and Papeete]