Your worst hotel experience?

A recent hotel stay reminded us of just how bad they can occasionally be. We checked into a respectable five star city hotel in the early evening, did some work, then went out to dinner and checked out a bar afterwards. We'd had a really exhausting day - morning shoot, long drive, flat tyre, an important appointment we almost missed. You get the picture. We rocked in from dinner around midnight, got changed, and dragged ourselves to bed, only to find the bed - the sheets, the edge of the pillows and the doona (quilt, eiderdown), well, um... damp. I took a sniff. It smelt okay, like water. No air-conditioning above the bed. Perhaps the laundromat hadn't properly dried it and it then dampened everything else? I called the front desk and explained. Half an hour later a housekeeper showed up without fresh linen. We explained again. He disappeared. He returned another 20 minutes later with fresh sheets, but no doona, no mattress protector. Bring a friend, I called out, as he disappeared, as you'll probably have to turn the mattress over too. He returned another 15 minutes later with a colleague, mattress protector, and doona. However, when they pulled off the mattress protector to turn the mattress over, we saw an enormous yellow circle. Yes! Urine! Why on earth a maid had remade a urine-soaked bed in a five star hotel that clearly wasn't full was beyond me. By 1.30am, the Night Manager had moved us. Did I ever tell you about the bed bugs story? So, what was your worst hotel experience? 

Pictured? Definitely not the hotel in question - that's one of our better hotel experiences.

Travel insights from travel experts

I am probably suffering from chronic information overload - how about you? - but increasingly I'm finding myself wanting to read more informed opinions from people with experience and expertise in a subject, no matter what the area, but especially travel. If I'm doing research or simply trying to stay abreast of trends, I don't have the time or inclination to sift through reviews and advice from people whose backgrounds and qualifications I know very little about. Which is why I very rarely visit Trip Advisor (see my post of yesterday for more on user-generated reviews) and which is why I was so happy when the smart people at Uptake, in partnership with BootsnAll Travel Network and Tips from the T-list, started Travel Insights 100 (and also asked me to join!). Travel Insights 100 consists of 100 opinion makers in travel, from tourism industry leaders to travel writers and bloggers. Essentially it's an online forum where you can find a diverse group of travel experts and a place for discussion about the issues and changes affecting travel around the globe. You'll find members' blog posts, RSS and Twitter feeds, as well as the results of surveys of the members that Uptake will undertake and release from time to time, the first of which was a survey - what else - on Twitter. Check out the actual results here and a summary here. And do let me know what you think.

Travel experts versus 'real' travellers

Travel 'experts', whether they are travel writers, guidebook authors, travel bloggers, tour guides, travel agents, hoteliers etc, are also 'real' travellers in my mind. Yet publishers and travel sites are frequently pitting the two against each other. Sure, the travel experts sometimes get special treatment and they can rarely shut themselves off from the act of reviewing, even when they're on holidays, but the fact is that they do take holidays and do travel like 'normal' people too. I book my flights and hotels online. I have to negotiate local transport like you do. I eat as many bad meals as I do good ones, and I also get allocated my share of crappy hotel rooms too. Yet increasingly the opinions of the experts - the people who stay in hundreds of hotel rooms a year, catch scores of flights, and talk to thousands of other travel experts and travellers - that is, the people who make it their business to accumulate vast travel experience and knowledge and develop skills at discernment - seem to be increasingly undervalued and overlooked in favor of the opinions of 'real' people. One example is the hotel reviews in Budget Travel (a magazine I love, by the way), such as this one which states that "Online reviews generally praise the hotel as an affordable gem with a fun, unique theme" and "Reader Dawn recommends Franklin Feel the Sound, where she stayed in June 2009. She writes that the Franklin exceeded her expectations and was excellent value". Frankly, unless I know who these online reviewers were and have more information about them and Dawn, I don't care what they think. I want to know how much hotel experience they've had, how many hotels in Rome they've checked into and inspected, and how many hotels they've stayed at fullstop, so I can then determine what their idea of "affordable" or "unique" is, and how different their expectations may be to that of other travellers. You see, travel experts know these things. What do you think?

Behind-the-scenes in a Michelin-starred chef's kitchen and the kindness of chefs

Being able to spend a night in the restaurant kitchen of a Michelin-starred chef - in this case that of Pierre Gagnaire at Reflets, Dubai - is one of the delights of our job. It wasn't our first time - which was Bacchus at Read's, Mallorca, where we dined at the Chef's Table and Terry did a Master Chef experience with Felix Eschrich - but our night at Reflets was probably one of our most enlightening and educative experiences in a restaurant kitchen. And Terry and I have both spent a lot of time in kitchens. I worked in Sydney cafes to put myself through uni and during high school for pocket money, while Terry did a stint working weekend nights in the kitchen of a friend's Surry Hills bistro to keep himself out of trouble when I went to South America to do my masters. But these were no fine dining restaurants! It would be inconceivable to think that a chef in a Michelin-starred fine-diner would retrieve a salad he'd dropped intentionally on a dirty floor, plopping it back in a bowl to be served to an impatient customer as one drug-crazed cook did in the kitchen of a popular Balmain cafe I onced worked at. What I also find inconceivable, after these Michelin-starred kitchen experiences, are the abusive Ramsay-like tirades of the kind we see on Hell's Kitchen. Because the atmosphere we witnessed in both kitchens was one of calm. No yelling. No screaming. No chaos. Very little confusion. Over the course of 3.5 hours of service at Reflets, we only heard the head chef shout "Allez! Allez!" a couple of times and witnessed a few minor moments from the sous chef, irritated with the energetic expediter who could occasionally be a little too eager to send unfinished plates out. In stark contrast, the chefs were cool and composed, the kitchen quiet. There was still a buzz, a real energy about the place, but it was a positive one. Throughout the night, when not checking plates, watching his team or talking to diners, a patient Pierre Gagnaire took time to explain, answer questions, and even ask us about our work and travels. He brought us delicious morsels of food that we savoured - some foie gras here, lobster ice-cream there - while Head Chef Olivier Biles brought us bottles of water and periodically asked if we were okay. Servers ducked out of range of Terry's camera and apologised for getting in our way, when we were the ones clearly in their's. What struck us is how extraordinarily professional, how kind, and how hospitable chefs of this calibre can be. It's their generosity in such stressful conditions that is most remarkable. But then it really shouldn't be surprising because when we talk to chefs about why they do what they do, mostly they say they do it to give pleasure. And how very pleasing the experience was. I'll let you know when the story's out.

Pictured? That's me chatting to Pierre Gagnaire.

In print and online

It's been a busy period for Terry and I, as you've gathered from the dearth of blog posts these last months. And we've got a lot of work being published to prove it, from a small 'Up Next' piece on Abu Dhabi in the September edition of National Geographic Traveler to half a dozen eco-experiences I wrote about in Rough Guide's Clean Breaks book. I saw our first edition Travellers Northern Italy guidebook for the first time in a bookshop in Dubai the other day too and got exhausted just looking at it - that was a tough trip. Although I know you don't believe me. We've always written for in-flight magazines, but we've been doing a lot more writing for them these past few months. If you're wondering why, it's because it's fun, the editors are lovely, easy to work with and respond to emails, it's nice to submit a story and see it in print a month or two later, and they pay on time. In September's Storytelling issue of Gulf Air's in-flight magazine Gulf Life, we have features on Abu Shady, Syria's last hakawati or professional storyteller and a review on the Sheraton Aleppo; while in the October issue, we have articles on Syrian sculptor Mustafa Ali; a new Damascus jazz duo comprised of opera star Rasha Razk and pianist Ghazwan Zerkli; and funky Zen bar in Damascus with its fabulous views. All feature Terry's gorgeous photos of course, as does a story on Doha Tribeca Film Festival director - he shot the stunning portrait of Amanda Palmer in the lobby of Doha's W hotel. We've got a bunch of stories in this month's issue of Jazeera's in-flight J Mag too, and in MPI's One Plus magazine a profile on Emirati Ali Al Saloom who is changing the way visitors to Abu Dhabi experience the UAE.

Envying a donkey his pace - the frenetic tempo of travel writing, part 2

So how, as travel writers, do we get ourselves into the situation I described in the last post? And is it possible to be a travel writer and avoid this frenzied pace of life? To answer the second question first, I don't think it is possible if you want to make more than a decent living out of this profession. To answer the first, the way we work now is that we go on a trip with a number of commissions up our sleeves, and then while we're on the ground we follow up more leads for stories and pitch new ideas to editors from that destination. But that doesn't mean that other requests for stories stop coming in. As wonderful as they are, most of the time they're not even related to the destination we're in, which of course complicates things. While we're on the road, an editor might email and ask "Where are you at the moment?" which usually means he/she has a hotel they want reviewed or lead they'd like us to pursue. We'd be crazy to say no. At the same time, the longer we stay in a place and the more people we meet, the more story ideas we develop. Although we worked on a dozen stories in Damascus this trip, I left with twice as many ideas that I'd love to pursue next time. Do we prefer working this way, on multiple commissions, to focusing on a guidebook and a story or two? Absolutely. For one, it pays a hell of a lot more for less work. Secondly, we're meeting way more people doing stories than we did on books because we're no longer pounding the pavements all day every day putting dots on maps and checking transport timetables. But more on that another time. One of the downsides to this frantic pace is that it leaves little time for blogging. But blogging doesn't pay the bills. And for now, I kind of like it that way. I'll tell you why another time. Now, I have a story (or three) to write.

Envying a donkey his pace - the frenetic tempo of travel writing, part 1

Our recent trip around the Middle East (see this post) wasn't meant to be that kind of trip. There was no guidebook to write. No insane photography commission for Terry to undertake. Just lots of stories and hotel reviews to research and a couple of meetings about a book we're developing. However, somehow a trip that was meant to be fairly straightforward and one we'd hoped would trundle along at a slower pace than normal - a donkey's pace was what I desired - turned into the usual frenzied adventure where we find ourselves running from one appointment to another, and working long days that extend well into the night, every day and night. And now we're frantically writing up those stories and Terry's editing and prepping images for the stories (hence the lack of time for blogging), at the same time as we're pitching more stories, doing more reviews, going on photo shoots, and prepping for the next trip - every day and night, well into the night. So how as travel writers do we get ourselves into this situation? And is it possible to avoid this frenzied life?