Review Individual Hotel Rooms with TripKick

May 14th, 2008, No Comments »

Via TechCrunch, TripKick is thin-slicing hotel reviewing on the web. Instead of just reviewing hotels (far too vague!), TripKick offers user-generated reviews of individual hotel rooms. It’s kind of the hotel room equivalent of SeatGuru:

Tripkick.com is designed to make your hotel experience an effortless one. We prepare you with the little known facts about each hotel room so you can make an educated decision when choosing your perfect room.

Each hotel page on our site offers a variety of helpful information. You can use us before you’ve chosen your hotel, or once you’ve already booked your reservation.

Here’s a sample page, for the the San Francisco Fairmont. The site has a nice aesthetic, though I have serious objections to the way they abbreviate headings. If you check out the ‘Compare Rooms’ tab, they have a table which includes column headings like “GREAT BATHRM” or “OVERSZ”. I may just be an old grammarian, but I miss those vowels.

No Comments »

Hotel Room Card Readers Are the Change Machines Of the 21st Century

April 23rd, 2008, 3 Comments »

Discuss.

As an arcade-loving boy, I grew up stuffing my bills into change machines over and over again, only to have the rolled right back out at me. The charming American affection for paper money and the rising price of soft drinks seems to have driven technological improvements, though. Now I can stick a bill into a vending machine with only, maybe, a 10% failure rate.

I can’t say the same for hotel room key cards and their readers. They seem to have a failure rate of, oh, 66%. That is, when I insert them in the lock or elevator thingie, I get the red light two out of three times.

Maybe I just have some kind of anti-key card aura?

3 Comments »