Hotels and Lodging

I returned to SWITZERLAND in September ’06, this time with a cousin.

Looking for an inexpensive place to stay at Roissy Aéroport Charles-de-Gaulle Paris Nord? I stayed at the Etap Hotel Roissy (335 rue de la Belle Étoile, ZAC Paris Nord 2, Roissey en FRANCE 95974; phone [+33] 892 68 3056, fax 149 89 3342 or visit www.etaphotel.com). There are 20 Etap hotels in the Paris area. Etap is a member of the Accor chain (800/466-8356).

I paid only €39 ($51) for one night in October ’06 and got what I paid for. There was no room key (instead, you enter a special code), no bellhop, no cart for hauling your own baggage, no phone and no clock.

In the middle of August ’06, I found myself in Helsinki, FINLAND — one of the world’s “Top Ten Most Expensive” cities — without a hotel room! So I logged onto the Internet (imagine travel today without the Net?) and within minutes had a room at the independently owned Airport Hotel Bonus Inn (Elannotie 9, 01510 Vantaa, Finland; phone + 358 [0] 9-825-511or e-mail hotel@bonusinn.fi).

The rack rate for a double room was €213 ($276). I found an Internet rate of €130 ($168) for a double.

Siem Reap is the town nearest to Angkor Wat, Cambodia, and on my visit to the famous temple, Jan. 11-14, 2007, I stayed in one of the town’s smaller hotels (about 30 rooms). The room had an in-room electronic safe into which I put some U.S. dollars, my passport and a few travelers’ checks.

I didn’t give it a second thought, having used these safes countless times over decades with no problems. I always assumed that a “safe-deposit box” was exactly what the words imply.

Based on my experience with hotel staff around the world, it seems the people out front are usually working at a hotel because it’s a good job to have while they’re in college or while they have something else as a career that just isn’t there yet. They’re very nice but have little training and even less motivation. They’re on the front line for complaints and get very few compliments.

I’m writing in response to the situation posed in the January ’07 issue, page 115, in which a hotel guest reported a malfunctioning television and mini-bar to the desk and nothing was done. ITN asked what steps should have been taken.

A 4-star hotel worthy of the rating should have been both able and eager to remedy the situation or, at the very least, offer a substantial room discount. The writer did not say if the occurrence was over a weekend, but, even then, true 4-star hotels should have maintenance personnel on call.

My friend, Patricia, and I traveled to Peru’s Amazon Basin during the high-water season one March. We found the surroundings so foreign that adjectives don’t suffice. It’s easier to use comparisons: tarantulas the size of cantaloupes, a rodent the size of a sheepdog, a termite nest the size of a beer keg, a monkey the size of a teacup, piranhas with teeth as sharp as, well, piranha teeth. . .

My wife and I have traveled to much of the world, but what stumped us was how to go by air from Georgetown, Guyana, to Paramaribo, Suriname. When we plugged the flight into the usual search engines, no answers appeared. Somehow we knew that an airline called META existed and flew, or once did fly, to that destination, but we couldn’t find it online.

We purchased BWIA tickets for a January ’07 round-trip flight, Miami-Trinidad-Georgetown, at a cost of $522 each. (On Jan. 1, 2007, BWIA became Caribbean Airlines.)

by Rita Berman, Chapel Hill, NC

I took an independent trip to Egypt, Oct. 26-Nov. 3, 2007, especially to see el-Amarna, where Nefertiti and Akhenaten had their City of the Sun.