The travel train resumes with a visit to the Soho Motel in Brisbane. I picked this because the Terraces on Wickham, my previous venue of choice, had become too expensive, and the Soho is right next door — there’s even a shot of the neighbouring hotel. On the other hand, there’s no denying the rooms are smaller:
As a side note, YouTube’s current uploading system is a festering heap of shit. Bring back the progress indicator!
A junket vlog covering that rarest of events, a leisure trip, this time to Blackpool to see French & Saunders on tour. I was quite impressed with the Dudley Hotel in Blackpool, especially considering (and I do keep mentioning this) the price:
The vlogging resumes for 2008 with this video shot in the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport at Burlingame. It’s the classic collection of whinges really: sink plugs, lighting and not enough coffee.
To kick off the New Year, here’s no less than seven hotel videos which I didn’t get around to uploading until the Christmas break. First up, an unexpected encounter with bogong moths at the Saville Park Suites in Canberra:
Next, a real rarity — a hotel I was staying in purely for a holiday, in this case Le Surf in Noumea:
Back in my usual cheapskate mode, here’s a quick tour through the Formule 1 in downtown Melbourne:
And then a return visit to the Terraces on Wickham in Brisbane, where I yet again got a room upgrade I couldn’t use:
Another return visit, this time to the Mercure Grosvener in Adelaide, where the management kindly gave me an upgrade on account of previous vlogs:
And then we zoom across the globe to Barcelona, where I checked into the Hotel AC and barely used its free minibar:
Finally, an ancient video of the Yotel at Gatwick Airport, which I did way back in July but never got round to posting for some reason:
As you’ll guess from the strained titles, I’ve now worn through the whole alphabet, so will be starting again from scratch with the next video. This would have been the Imperial Palace in Vegas, except I’ve had to cancel my trip at the last minute. Harrumph.
For my second trip to Vegas in three months, I ended up back at Mandalay Bay, in a room largely identical to the one I stayed in last time. It wasn’t exactly identical, however, which left me some wriggle room to whinge.
Gusworld’s Junket Vlog returns to San Francisco, this time checking out the pluses and minuses of the Parc 55 hotel. The very first Gusworld Junket Vlog, W is for Wonky was also filmed in San Francisco when I attended the Dreamforce conference; one year later, Dreamforce has been on again, and I’ve filmed 38 hotel videos. Good grief.
It’s not unusual for minor things to go wrong when on an overseas press junket, but Intel has managed to raise the bar for IDF, which I’m currently attending in San Francisco. Despite inviting me a month ago, organising my flights and setting up a personal itinerary for me, nobody actually bothered to register me for the conference itself. Cue me arriving at the venue this morning to find no record of me in any conference systems at all, and a rather sceptical registration manager who wanted me to produce a printed article with my byline in it to prove I was actually a working journalist. Persistence, a sheer degree of narkiness and the remark that since Intel had paid to fly me halfway round the world for this event, letting me in might make sense, got me in the doors in the end.
Fresh from my trip to the Influence Forum, here’s the most important story of all: how did the Crowne Plaza measure up as a hotel? Pretty well, as it happened. (Apart from anything else, they get bonus points for having enough wine glasses to accommodate a late-night drunken video shoot — not this one, but watch this space for details.)
I might have got the Countdown Spectacular 2 Newcastle concert review up within an hour or so of the show finishing, but the associated hotel vlog has taken a little longer. Dive in to discover the (possibly) dark secrets of the Newcastle Ibis.
Another day, another junket vlog, another hotel in Melbourne. This time it’s the RACV Club, which had more windows than any room I’ve ever stayed in before.