November 5th, 2007

Filed under:
Malta, Technology, Travel

Five Star Hotel, Two Star Wifi Page

As we occasionally do, Julie and I spent a couple of hours today working in the lovely bar at the Kempinski Hotel San Lawrenz. I think it’s the only five star hotel on Gozo, and despite its peculiar location (there are no views of the sea), it’s quite posh.

I wasn’t using the web, but I happened to visit the hotel’s portal page for its wifi service. Here it is:

Two-Star Web Page

That looks pretty weak, doesn’t it? Why does a five-star hotel, with its spa smelling of sandalwood and lavendar, it’s beautifully-tiled pools and gorgeously-appointed rooms, have such a crappy-looking login page? The Kempinski isn’t unique in this peculiar disconnect–I’ve seen worse in plenty of four and five-star hotels.

It’s a tiny thing, but swish hotels aspire to get the tiny things right. The five-star devil, after all, is in the details. On the other hand, at least I wasn’t presented with an image of some kind of fruitophile.

Incidentally, I took that screenshot with a great little OS X program that Monique tipped me off on. It’s called Paparazzi, and all it does is make a full-length screenshot of any URL you enter. It saves you the trouble of stitching screenshots together.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

Comments: 3 Responses so far

And for those PC users out there - there’s a Firefox plugin called Screengrab that does the same thing: http://www.screengrab.org/

It works great!

[Reply]

Well, at least the drinks are good at the Kempinsky.

Do you realise that Scoble is tracking back to your starfish diagram?

http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/02/social-media-starfish/

[Reply]

The short answer is that they generally outsource their WiFi since they have no idea how that Internets thing works.

Interestingly, when I was in Barcelona this year the Hotel Princessa Sophia used a company based out of New Brunswick to manage their WiFi authentication.

[Reply]

Add a comment