Dear Bloggers,

So, I know you’ve all been waiting for an update on this crazy new art scene in Neukölln. I had nearly forgotten until today when our chef—who is really a painter—mentioned that he has an exhibition going up this weekend “in a new gallery in Neukölln.”
Surprise surprise.

So, today I’d like to focus on a gallery that popped up in front of my former apartment about a week after I moved out. It’s called Gelegenheiten which means “opportunities” in German. Gelegenheiten is located on the hottest street in the area, Westerstraße. Housed in what should probably be a ground-floor apartment, Gelegenheiten has a small foyer with a bar and three smaller back rooms where visitors can sit in old, sometimes broken, always dusty chairs and enjoy the Bohemian vibe.

Gelegenheiten is open every Thursday and Saturday as well as the first Friday of every month starting at 8pm. But don’t try to impress the Berliners with a fashionably late entrance. Most shows are over by 10:30 to avoid noise complaints from the neighbors. The space is operated by a collective of students in their mid-to-late twenties, most of whom have been in Neukölln much longer than the current art scene.

Guests include everything from local musicians to international video artists and the quality ranges from excellent to trash. The program can be found at www.gelegenheiten-berlin.de and must be checked frequently as schedules are subject to change and invariably do.

The easiest way to get to Gelegenheiten is the U7. Get off at Rathaus Neukölln and walk north until you hit the perpendicular-running Weserstraße. It’s number 50 on the corner of Weser and Elbestraße. And if you happen to see a cute little Spanish girl with a buzz cut, tell Paula I say hi.

Thanks for reading and til next time!
Amy

Dear Bloggers,

It looks like we’ve been talking a lot recently about fancy-shmanzy business and luxury hotels. My apologies. Clearly, some of you have been neglected. For those of you who prioritize savings over stars, pennies over potpourri, let me take a moment to help you learn how to search for a cheap hotels.

The following is a list I made with five methods of finding the cheap hotel of your dreams. This is not easy though, my friends. You must read the list thoroughly and then, you must even do what it says. But if you’re serious about economy and serious about accommodations, then read on and learn.

1. Know Thyself – There are a lot of inexpensive hotels out there. There are also a lot of hotels that are just “cheap.” Before you begin your search for a hotel that won’t run you out of the bank, you need to level with yourself. What do you need from a hotel? What sort of amenities are you willing to forsake? Where are your limits? Once you’ve determined your own personal level of flexibility, then you can begin your search.

2. Pre-Research Phase – It’s not just about finding a hotel that will cost less. As I mentioned, there are a lot of cheap hotels and they’re relatively easy to find. Your goal is to find a hotel in the right location, with the right atmosphere for you.

3. Talk to Friends & Family – I know it sounds old school, but the best advice you can get is straight from the horse’s mouth. If you’re looking for a cheap hotel somewhere, you’re likely to know someone who has already stayed at a cheap hotel in that same location. Ask friends and family about their own experiences. This can be a very fast solution to finding exactly what you’re looking for.

4. Consult Travel Publications – There are a number of excellent budget travel guides that provide personalized, comprehensive information about cheap hotels all around the world. My two personal favorites are Let’s Go and Lonely Planet. Let’s Go is particularly good for students and back-packers, those travelers looking for a hotel with only one recent rat sighting as opposed to two. The book is written by Harvard students who have traveled to and stayed at every hotel mentioned. Lonely Planet has a slightly more gentrified target audience, but they provide great analyses and suggestions when it comes to budget hotels. Pick up a copy of either of these publications at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble and let the reading begin!

5. Online Travel Guides – Online travel guides provide easy access to a comprehensive look at both the broader selection of cheap hotels as well as the specific details about each hotel you’ll want to know before making your choice.

There are generally two types of online travel guides. The first is the online overview. The online overview, sites like Wikitravel, offers a simple list of hotels that fall into your budget price range. Once you have this list, you can then pursue research on each individual hotel by checking out the hotels’ homepages and online reviews. The second type of online travel guide is the travel search engine. Travel search engines, like Kayak.com, are great tools for comparing deals across online booking sites. All booking sites claim to offer the lowest rates, but with a travel search engine, you can put this to the test. What’s even better about the search engines is that once you’ve located the hotel you want, a confirmed booking is just one click away.

Now that you are a master of cheap-hotel-finding, go forth young bloggers and discover the myriad cheap hotels worldwide. Somewhere, I promise, is the perfect cheap hotel for you.

Til next time,
Amy

Hotwire.com – is another one of the biggies. Like Priceline and Orbitz – and within some days Hotels-in.com – Hotwire’s services include booking for hotels, flights, car rentals and vacation packages. They also have a particularly handy tool called “Trip Watcher.” With Trip Watcher, you can tell Hotwire where you want to go and they’ll send you updates on rates and specials. And it’s free!

Like Hotels Combined, Hotwire’s homepage tells us how Hotwire is “different—and better.” Curious, I clicked on the link and was redirected to a comprehensive website with texts and flow-charts. The main distinguishing factor seems to be the company’s “Hot Rates” which are generally unsold tickets and rooms Hotwire’s partner companies need to sell.

Like many of these larger sites, Hotwire’s major downside is that it’s really impersonal. There’s neither a blog nor even traveler advice or reviews. So, if you don’t already know where you want to go, and money isn’t your first priority, Hotwire probably isn’t going to be much help.

www.orbitz.com – this is getting tedious. Orbitz is another hotel, car, flight and vacation-booking website and if you want to know the “Top reasons to book your hotel on Orbitz”, you can find out at their homepage. Orbitz’s reasons sound a lot like those of its competitors’: we cost less, we’re cheaper, we get lower rates…

Time to do some investigating.

Orbitz’s color is blue. Other than that, it is almost identical to Hotwire.com. Same organization, same lay-out, same prices. Or is it? Recently, Orbitz announced it has “enhanced” its Low Price Guarantee, “giving customers ironclad confidence they’re getting the lowest possible hotel prices.” The Guarantee basically works like this: if you book a hotel (for example one of the hotels in ca) through Orbitz and then find the same room type for less on another site, Orbitz will pay back the difference and give you a $50 discount on your next booking.

Not bad for an otherwise impersonal, corporate booking site. Perhaps Orbitz is indeed more than meets the eye.

www.kayak.com – is a budget hotel, car and flight finder operated out of the UK. Just to demonstrate for you exactly how incestuous the online travel booking community is: KAYAK is brought to you by the same guys who started Orbitz who are the same guys who started Travelocity who are the same guys who started Expedia. Unlike these companies, however, KAYAK is not a booking site. It’s a “travel search engine”, which hunts through other travel sites to match your request. Kayak lets you choose whether to book through travel websites or online travel agencies, which helps get you better prices. KAYAK has been lauded by BusinessWeek, Forbes, TIME Magazine, the A.P. and many other accredited publications.

So far so good.

I have to admit, KAYAK isn’t much to look at. It’s pretty much just a blank page with some awkward, orange and blue text. There are no flashy graphics or hip deal alerts common on booking sites. That all changes though once you actually conduct a search.  Once you’ve entered in a few details about where you’d like to go, a host of information and prioritization options pop up. You can search for a hotel by name, by amenities, by proximity to a specific landmark, number of stars. It’s all very straight forward, very fast and very good.

Las Vegas With Children – The Palazzo Hotel in Las Vegas
by Ivan Bradley (Nov 24, 2009)

Well, it’s been a good few years since I last went to Vegas – going on holiday at the best of times is difficult with two kids. But I’ve been determined to go back ever since the little ones arrived. Since then, most of our vacations of late have tended to be either staying at my wife’s relatives’ houses in the country or safe in the comfort of Disneyland resort hotels.

Convincing the wife to allow me to go to Vegas wasn’t easy, and naturally I had to agree to certain conditions. “We’re
staying somewhere nice, and I absolutely refuse to go to one of those all-you-can-eat places,” she instructed. You’ve probably realised by now that she’s a hard customer to please. “And there has to be plenty to do for all of us-” she reminded me.

So, entertaining the possibility that this may be more trouble than it was worth, I swallowed my pride and booked four nights in the Palazzo hotel. It’s got a good reputation for families, and I could always bribe my wife with the temptation of Barneys or the SpaClub,  both of which are located inside the Palazzo.

The budget didn’t quite extend to one of the Palazzo’s six villas, but we didn’t really need that much space anyway. Instead, to accommodate the four of us we opted for a suite. Now that the kids are a little bit older, they want their own room and having a suite is an acceptable compromise. Our suite also helpfully came with some gambling and dining credits, which helped satisfy my wife for a little while.

I’m not sure what real Italians would make of the Palazzo – despite the Italian name and image, it’s not exactly a discreet little Tuscan pensione. However, the acres of marble and gilt-edged ceilings are undeniably impressive. It is, however every inch the Vegas resort hotel complete with several casinos, 15 restaurants, 11 pools – you name it. It’s also located to several other Las Vegas hotels on the strip.

The centrepiece of the next-door Venetian is an indoor canal, complete with boats and gondoliers! They’ll even sing, although this does get a little tiresome. Naturally the kids managed to twist my arm and within an hour of us arriving in the hotel, we were being swept along to the dulcet tones of “Frederico” – all the while the hum of slot machines singing away in the background.

But the real reason for coming of course was the gambling. I’d hope to repeat some of the success I’d had last time I was here. Thankfully, the Palazzo hotel isn’t short of gaming options, and include all the usuals such as blackjack, baccarat, poker, craps etc. I also saw in the guide the ‘high-limit salon’, which is a mini casino for the high rollers, and certainly not for the likes of me.

I got off to a good start, winning a few hands of poker. Then as my confidence grew so my bets kept getting larger. Three Pina Coladas and five hands later, things had taken a turn for the worse. The temptation in these situations is always to Martingale – with each losing hand, double the bet you’re placing and then eventually when you win, your loses will be written off. It’s not a very good idea, and it wasn’t long before I’d lost most of what I’d put in.

Thankfully I’d saved a little, and went to the roulette wheel where my game was moderately more successful. Palazzo’s lady luck was shining on me, and it wasn’t long before I’d got back into the swing of things.

Careful not to blow all of the kids inheritance, I met up with the others at the Palazzo’s Grand lux cafe- it’s a casual restaurant so was no problem to take the kids. None of us could resist the Chocolate Molten Cake dessert for which this place is fast becoming famous.

We spent much of the rest of our precious days amusing ourselves in several of Las Vegas’ more child-friendly attractions including the Aventuredome (enormous indoor theme park) and Circus Circus. It wasn’t difficult to find things to do with the kids, and if we had longer I would definitely have liked to go to the Star Trek Experience – but probably the kids wouldn’t have been too interested in that!

I managed to escape the gambling halls until the last night – the draw of the poker table was just too much in the end. Unfortunately the lucky run I’d had a few nights before was by now well and truly over. I expect you can imagine what my wife said when I returned to the suite with empty pockets!

Topic: Las Vegas with children, Palazzo Hotel in Las Vegas

Wynn Hotel Las Vegas – You know, sometimes even a fucked-up dotcom Yuppie like myself has gotta let his hair down a little – and last week things had got to that point again: A little fooling around in Las Vegas was most definitely on the cards.

Whenever I drop into Las Vegas what I like most is just to grab one of the gratis suites in one of the 5 Star hotels there, like for example the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas. Of course you get used to that kind of thing but some decent personal service is still a pleasure, as is finding a good 1950 single malt in the minibar instead of the usual gargle. Also of course the personnel begin to aquant themselves by and by to one’s personal preferences – no common or garden fruit in the basket, exclusively Williams Pears – and like I wrote in my last post: It’s simply a bore always having to break in a new butler. And the minimum stake of 20,000USD I’m quite happy to take on board, and anyway I’m a winner. So I say: Let’s go gamble in Vegas.

So I left my yacht parked in Malta – the harbour is so much more discreet than that in Monaco, and the salt content only marginally less. Flying first class AA means that the flight is also a pleasure in itself, some nifty air hostesses, a good on-board program and yeah, the 180 degree recliners including massage function can make the flight worthwhile by themselves – and the manicure wasn’t bad either.

The Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas also offers an excellent limo service – stretch of course – Lexus, Lincoln, Mercedes etc. – they know what they need to offer a customer such as myself.

Upon arrival first off jump into the Power Shower – what a great invention – and then on to the massage. And at this point let me say: Tommy, you are a genius, if I ever decide to be gay then we’ll meet next to Elvis in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Church in Vegas. I’ll just say this: Hawaiian Massage is a must-have, a cool three or four hours of that and jet lag is just not a problem anymore.

The decently assorted fruit basket in the living room was also not lacking – I hate fruits in the sleeping area – fresh kiwis straight from New Zealand, strawberries  from South America, pears from Germany and of course litschis direct from Thailand. That’s just how it should be.

Like I say I’m always more than happy to stop by in Las Vegas….time and time again.

And my recommendation? Take a luxury suite in Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas.

So in case one of you is ever in the Wynn Hotel, then do leave a comment here, and then you can go kick back with my butler and a Coke.

Hotelclub.com – is a respectable booking site that also offers assistance organizing cars, flights and travel insurance. Like Priceline and other popular hotel booking sites, Hotelclub focuses on finding discount rates at hotels around the world. They have a helpful display of the lowest prices available according to the city. The folks at Hotelclub also reach out to their customers with consumer hotel reviews and a travel blog.

The blog is very informative, though it at times reads like a Wikitravel page. It’s not personalized and focuses more on specific travel destinations than on the hotels near those destinations. For more personalized information, Hotelclub has a Facebook page where customers and “Fans” can post reviews and share advice amongst themselves.

Hotelclub has to be one of my favorite hotel-booking sites. It’s chic design, user-friendliness  and undergoing efforts to provide a personalized platform for travelers distinguish it from even the most commercially successful hotel-booking websites.

Hotel-Booking.com

Hotel-booking.com – is a hotel-booking site out of Italy that defies every law of visual organization. Now, maybe it’s just me. Maybe there’s some deep-rooted cultural rift between the way Italians and Americans interact with visual information. Maybe…

The homepage is more or less one large table divided into search categories of: destination, hotel name, days, stars, rooms and currency. These are actually very practical and applicable categories and the set-up is admittedly functional—no scrolling is required to see everything the website has to offer. Unfortunately, each subheading is delineated by a thick red line, turning the page into a starless American flag with a fitting column of travel ads to the right.

Perhaps the interface is less important to you, however. Then let me turn your attention to the site’s creative use of the English language. The banner at the top of the page reads: “Search, find and buy the best hotel for you in the world at the best rate. HOTELBOOKING: more than 70.000 hotels in the world! LET’S COMPARE AND BOOK NOW!!!” While I appreciate the exceptional enthusiasm, the questionable grammar leaves me skeptical about booking my hotels with hotel-booking.com.

Booking.com – has a lovely, simple layout. Little scrolling is needed to see what’s where and the site even offers a vacation suggestion link where you click on the region of your choice and they inform you about that region’s sites and activities. What our team didn’t like so much though was the complete lack of any personal assessment or thought. The site might as well have been made by robots on Mars.

To avoid this at hotels-in.com, we’ve created a number of personalized features to help us (Daniel, Gerhard, Will, Oliver and me) communicate our thoughts and preferences directly with you. We also decided, out of the pure kindness of our hearts, to offer “Free Stuff” which includes city guides to various travel destinations as well as music which we find cool.