Hotels and Lodging

For five days in May 2017, my husband and I stayed at a reputable 4½-star hotel in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The morning of the third day, I removed our passports from our room’s safe to carry with us. We were gone most of the day.

When I went to return the passports to the safe, it wouldn’t open. The sign said “E-code,” which meant we were using the wrong code. I tried several times, each time waiting 15 to 20 minutes before trying again, but the safe did not cooperate.

For the visit to our 105th destination (as defined by the Travelers’ Century Club’s list of countries and territories at www.travelerscenturyclub.org), we were seeking a cheap foreign trip that required less than an 8-hour plane ride. Coincidentally, Travelzoo.com was promoting an air-inclusive deal from Azores Getaways (Estrada de São Gonçalos, 235, 9500-343 Ponta Delgada, Azores, Portugal; phone, in the US, 617/934-8474, azores getaways.com/en).

We took our third tour with George Nevin, owner and operator of Intimate France (Oakland, CA; 800/676-1247, www.intimatefrance.com), Sept. 6-18, 2015, this time to the Dordogne area of France. Rather than cover that beautiful area, in this review we will focus on what a guest on one of George’s four tours a year can expect.

Kip Sturdevan of Encinitas, California, wrote (May ’17, pg. 17), “Several of our friends have taken walking tours on which the organizing companies had arranged accommodations and made sure the luggage was moved every day to the next night’s lodging, thus allowing the walkers to carry only day packs. Each day’s hike tends to vary from 7 to 14 miles.

In early June, the city of Venice, Italy, banned the opening of new hotels in the city center in an attempt to stem the tide of tourists flocking to the city each year. The ban does not prevent new hotels from opening on the outlying islands or on the mainland. 

Each year, Venice, which has a population of 55,000, attracts nearly 30 million tourists. At the time of the new hotel ban, the city center had 25,400 rooms for let. 

Throughout Japan, balding guests will receive a discount of ¥500 (near $4.50) at any of the 13 hotels of the Hotel Tetora Group. Upon check-in, front desk staff will determine if a patron is balding (shaved heads also count), instituting the discount if he is. For links to each hotel’s homepage, visit www.e-tetora.com/en and scroll down.

The owner of the hotel group, a bald man, himself, said that he decided to create the discount after hearing cleaning staff complaining about the amount of hair they had to clear out of shower drains.