5 Reasons I Don’t Shop at Your Store
  photo credit: Justin Marty |
When it comes to where I take my business, I’m a pretty picky customer. I demand a lot of the places I shop, especially the ones I’m going to get into my car and drive to.
First, there are the obvious criteria for where I shop. The store has to be reasonably close, has to have what I need/want, be friendly and has to have reasonable prices. But then there are the less-obvious reasons, reasons that it appears many shop owners and managers forget in their bustle to keep the ship sailing forward.
So, as a public service to those stores I haven’t seen in a while, here are my top five less-common reasons I don’t visit your business. Read more
Mardi Gras Monday: Sleeping and Parking
 photo credit: mil8 |
This is part of an ongoing series of Mardi Gras-related posts. You can follow the rest of the posts here.
If you’re visiting New Orleans for Mardi Gras, you’re going to face two challenges, finding a place to stay and finding a place to park.
It may not be the most pleasant things to think about when visiting New Orleans, but if you don’t put some planning into them your time here is going to be ruined and they are two very easy things to mess up.
The problem is pretty simple. Though New Orleans is a tourist town, Mardi Gras is the absolute peak of its season. Though the entire time between Halloween and Fat Tuesday is active in general, in the last weeks, the city gets slammed. Hotels fill up quickly and parking, already scarce in the city as it is an older one (much of it laid out before automobiles), becomes prized.
So how do you overcome these obstacles? There are a lot of ways, but here are some of my tips. Read more
The Hotel Paradox
 photo credit: the_toe_stubber |
Over the past year I have had the opportunity to do a great deal of traveling and I am eternally grateful for it. Nearly a dozen conferences have invited me to speak and most have been generous enough to provide me a hotel room to stay at.
Though I have no complaints about my accommodations anywhere that I have been, it has given me a strange and unique opportunity to stay at a wide variety of hotels all over the world. From inexpensive chain hotels to b&bs to several very high-end establishments, I’ve probably stayed in them all within the past 12 months.
In this time, I’ve noticed something very unusual. There seems to be something of a paradox in the world of hotels. The nicer a hotel is, the less you actually get for your stay. Where there are some products where price paid has no effect on the quality of service, hotels seem to have taken the whole “You get what you pay for” cliche and turned it around, ensuring that you always pay for what you don’t get.
It’s a frustrating kludge that has me wondering if, as customers, if we have gotten the whole idea of what makes a good hotel completely wrong and, rather than an abstract star system, its time we actually rate hotels based upon whether they actually provide what we need.
I know it’s a radical idea, but I think it may be one whose time has come. Read more
