Hotel Secrets from the Travel Detective

Informationen zum Autor PETER GREENBERG is the travel editor of NBC’s Today show and the author of The Travel Detective and The Travel Detective Flight Crew Confidential . He is also the chief correspondent for the Discovery network’s Travel Channel and editor at large for National Geographic Traveler magazine. Klappentext Indispensable information for away-from-home lodging! from the author of the New York Times bestseller The Travel Detective In Hotel Secrets from the Travel Detective! America's best-known and most trusted travel authority reveals the insider knowledge that can make every hotel stay as comfortable as (and sometimes even more cost-efficient than) home. With his incomparable access and nose for news! Peter Greenberg shares the secrets that people who know hotels—managers! maids! reservation clerks! bellhops! chefs! and maintenance guys—don't want you to know about value! service! safety! security! and cleanliness. Tips include: • How to tell if your room is really clean • What never to order from room service • The real way to prevent hotel crime • How to beat excessive hotel phone charges • The exact rooms where headline-making events took place Drawn from the author's experiences as both an investigative reporter and a constant traveler! Hotel Secrets from the Travel Detective is an essential guide to everything from luxury resorts to motels! from airport hotels and bed-and-breakfasts to outrageous (and often secret) alternatives to hotels. CHAPTER 1   My Life in Hotels     People travel for the same reason as they collect works of art: because the best people do it.   —Aldous Huxley   I have been traveling and staying in hotels since I was six months old. I’ve stayed—and, some might argue, I have lived—in hotels most of my adult life. At the very least, hotels could be considered my second home, and certain ones qualify me for near permanent residence status.   My official residence is Los Angeles, but in the past three years, I have spent an average of forty-seven nights a year there, few of them even consecutive. I have made the acquaintance of some of my neighbors in Los Angeles, but I know all of the bell and front desk staff at the Mark Hotel and Essex House hotels in New York, the Athenaeum in London, the Regent and the Oriental in Bangkok. When I check into these hotels, the staff often greets me by saying, “Welcome home.” I feel at home in hotels.   Indeed, hotels are where we live much of our personal history. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, so many of the modern mythical heroes eventually turn up at one of the great hotels. Murders, love affairs, business intrigue, and political negotiations, ranging from acts of war to declarations of surrender, happen at hotels. The players include arms merchants and divas, journalists and boxers, traveling salesmen like Willy Loman, and real-life characters like Ernest Hemingway. Each has his or her own special relationship with hotels.   Hotels evolved as transportation options grew, and the types of hotels became as distinct as the fast-changing and different types of people who started to visit them. Butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers—as well as the owners of their businesses—came to stay.   Small inns were eclipsed by skyscrapers like the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, railroad hotels in Canada dwarfed the terminals they served, and a new form of grand hotel architecture was accelerated by the appearance of hotels like the Savoy in London and the Ritz in Paris. It’s been argued that the grand hotel was one of the great innovations of the Industrial Revolution—a visible reflection and a symbol of an elevated society, as much seduced by service as demanding of it.   With every grand hotel came not only pomp and circumstance but a sense of entitlement. If you were in ...

Product details

• Authors: Peter Greenberg
• Publisher: Random House USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 09.03.2004
• EAN: 9780375759727
• ISBN: 978-0-375-75972-7
• No. of pages: 291
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 204 mm x 16 mm
• Series: VILLARD BOOK