Bandstand

Getting ready for the high season

Very busy trying to get everything ready. Walls are being repainted. Others are being touched up. New wooden floors in the remaining rooms. Additional toilets on the mezzanine floors. New sofa beds in the family rooms and new furniture ordered for rooms 106, 206 and 208. We have completed painting the back of the hotel and sorted out the gardens at the rear. Resolved the leak in 105 and replastered the ceiling in the front lounge. Now I just need some guests so I can pay all my credit cards off.

Veolia Environmental Services

Veolia have been refusing to collect our rubbish for the past week claiming we hadn't paid them. In fact we had paid them but they made a mistake in the accounts department. Spent most of this morning sorting it with the bank and their accounts department. Received a cursory sorry but then, to add insult to injury, the woman suggested we should have picked it up earlier....

Opinions from real travellers???

TripAdvisor has been told it cannot claim all of its reviews are written by real travellers. The Advertising Standards Authority said claims that all reviews on the travel site are genuine are "misleading". The ruling came after complaints highlighted statements on the TripAdvisor website which claimed: "reviews you can trust" and "more than 50 million honest travel reviews and opinions from real travellers around the world".

The complainants said that TripAdvisor did not verify the reviews and therefore could not prove that they were genuine or from real travellers. They said that consumers would take the claims on the website to mean they could be certain the reviews posted were from genuine travellers.

TripAdvisor said they used "advanced and highly effective" fraud detection systems but were told not to claim or imply that all the reviews that appeared on the website were from real travellers, or were honest, real or trusted....or from people who even stayed in your hotel as happened to us!!!

Seasons Greetings

All I want for Christmas.........

A few more guests especially over winter
No more floods in rooms 105/107
Much better and more reliable rail service
Free parking throughout Eastbourne
No more hassle from the tax office
A reduction on VAT for hotels
To be number 5 on TripAdvisor
Another great year for Eastbourne
A happy New Year for all our guests
Free recycling for small businesses

Environmentally unfriendly

Having replaced old baths with new showers to be more environmentally friendly...I now discover that I am not. It now seems that the average shower lasts eight minutes which is much longer than previous studies suggested, using almost as much water and energy as the average bath.

The survey, carried out by Unilever,concluded that an eight-minute shower used 62 litres of hot water, compared with an average bath's 80 litres which probably explains why the leaks from rooms 105 and 107 are doing so much damage to the ceiling in the front lounge!!!