Early in the year I bought a hotel package deal. Nothing special there – I know a lot of people who buy daily deals, groupons etc.  but this was my first deal and I have to say I was a little exited about it.

The deal was from boards.ie and it was for a nights stay in the Prince of Wales in Athlone with dinner for two, a bottle of wine, breakfast and a late checkout. The price? 79 euro. Bargain. It was from boards.ie but it could have been from anyone.

I rang in May looking for a Friday night but couldn’t get a Friday Night – “All the Friday & Saturday nights for boards vouchers were gone”. I also rang in June & July and got the same response. It seemed only mid-week slot were available which doesn’t suit most people. With the voucher due to expire in September I decided we would use it when we got back from holidays .. to help us ‘adjust’ into the Irish Summer.

I booked it for a Thursday night.  The Prince of Wales (if you google them) states it’s a recently refurbished four star hotel but it doesn’t really have the facilities that you expect for a 4 star hotel. If you put the Sheraton (also 4 star) beside the PoW it’s hard to understand why the Prince of Wales is a four star hotel.

We checked in fine, the receptionist asked what time we’d like to reserve our meal for – we agreed 8pm. The room, on the 2nd floor, was  clean and typically what you get from Irish hotels today. The room was a little stuffy so we opened the window to get some fresh air. The window looked out over the square and towards the entrance of the town shopping centre and consisted of a main window and a second separate sliding window.

Around 8pm we went to have our dinner. We headed towards the Restaurant but we were told it was closed and that we could have our meal in the Pub arena. The pub had the usual combination of high tables and low tables with plenty of televisions showing a championship soccer match on all of them.

There wasn’t many tables left as most people were having a drink so we ended up under a large flatscreen TV – not ideal as you think most people are staring at you!  We got menus only to find out the usual menu wasn’t the menu for voucher holders. The voucher menu didn’t really have a great choice but we found something to eat. Having dressed up a little bit we felt a little overdressed in the pub to be honest.

The bottle of wine was a very cheap and cheerful Cono-Sur bottle which retails about 5euro but listed as 18euro in the wine list.

The mushroom soup starter was dire, one of the main courses (beef) was dry and tasteless. The other main course (chicken) was fine but the vegetables were over cooked and soggy. Desert wasn’t anything to write home about either.

As we were finishing up we noticed the pub was starting to fill up with people out for the night – as it turns out the Prince of Wales has a nightclub and it swung into full swing by midnight. We went back to the room and the noise from  the people coming and going was booming into our room with the windows opened so they had to be closed. With no air-con the room was hot & stuff and not conducive to sleep. Also the low-frequency booms from the nightclub music didn’t help at all in getting some sleep.

It was about 3am when the music had stopped , the people had gone home and when we eventually got some piece and quite.

Not being happy campers we left early in the morning without the breakfast . Being a bit peeved with the whole experience and just wanted to get out of the place as quickly as possible and promising never to return.

It’s left me very wary of hotels that advertise via daily deals, I also put my hands up that  I didn’t do my research either – the Prince of Wales on their homepage advertise the nightclub and hen parties – so the moral of the story is beware of the deal that seems too good to be true and do your research!!

Putting my mini-rant aside – the bigger picture is that hotels could be getting a quick revenue injection from deals like this but if the experience is bad it will hurt them in the long run. A bad customer experience will ensure that customer doesn’t return and tells other people of how bad it was and to avoid them. The exact opposite is also true – so hotels – if you’re listening – get it right. Give Friday/Saturday nights, open the restaurant, give good food and wine.. and for the love of gaud put guest miles away from the noise if you have to have a nightclub!

While in Bangor we got the opportunity to climb some fantastic mountains that Wales has in abundance, namely Snowdon (3,300 ft) and Mynydd Mawr (2,290ft).  Funnily enough Mynydd Marr  translates into ‘Big Mountain’ even though it’s a good 1,oooft shorter than Snowden!

We met up with Paul Sandham of Geosho at the Inventorium event and climbed Mynydd Friday evening. Paul then recommended we take the Watkin path to avoid the masses – and boy was he spot on. On Saturday we climbed Snowden in glorious sunny weather as did 100o’s of others – thankfully they all took the easy path while we took the hardest . It was tough going but we managed to get up in just over 2 hours. On the way down Iano transformed in some kind mountain goat.. he would have been down in less than hour if I hadn’t slowed him down!

If you ever get the chance you should climb Snowdon – the view is just amazing..

So the week is over and what have we done? Loads & loads with most of the ToDo’s done.  Really happy too because it was a short week.  One of the nice achievements was the Headers (astro soccer team) getting back to winning ways.. 9-2 last night. About time too!

Next week is block booked, as is the following week when we head to World Travel Market in London,  so a fair bit of work over the weekend

The presentation for next week went in (on time) – so that’s  a load off my mind. We just have to deliver it with style!

Earlier in the week I was in Dublin meeting up the O, Ha and JJ.. we also went up to cheer on  C (as she listed herself in the Dublin marathon!) who ran it just over 4hrs. Well done C!

Ian and I were discussing this yesterday… okay okay.. it was me who was re-enacting the scene for Ian as we drove back to the house (minus the actual beer bottles). He wasn’t impressed

Makes me laugh every time.

Maybe next time we could do the Mocking-Bird-Scene..

via Ivor..

When heading to lunch today with the guys we discussed presentation training  – which is running this week. It was suggested we prepare something.. otherwise we’d be stuck to say something and say whatever came into our heads. I immediately thought of Brick from Anchorman and ‘I love lamp’ … the other guys looked at me in a very funny way..  (they think I’m crazy!)

2mins in .. I love lamp… and of course LAMP (nerd joke)

When the guys were ordered to cut down the tree in Holy Mary Parish Church I bet they didn’t reckon on chainsawing out the Virgin Mary. Well that’s what’s after happening in Rathkeale Limerick.

Bock the robber has some thoughts on the matter.

I love the qoute from Local parish priest Fr Willie Russell who said on radio station Limerick Live 95FM yesterday that people should not worship the tree. “There’s nothing there . . . it’s just a tree . . . you can’t worship a tree.”

* picture from Irish Times

It’s friday and my coffee cup needs a wash.. but I think I see something in it.. oohh that’s right it’s stale coffee.

I like twitter - I sometimes use it to set a status in both Facebook and twitter, but recently I’ve been questioning why am I using it at all? What purpose does it serve? What am I getting out of twitter? At the moment not a lot – it’s a bit of fun. Full Stop.

As an experiment I recently posted a string of words including ‘soccer’ ‘insurance’ and ‘limerick’. Within in 20 minutes I had people aka insurance sales people, football sites following me and ‘Castletroy’ following me – all their tweets were trying to sell me stuff. Not impressed.

I can see twitter been useful for PinPoints - get a tweet if there is an update to an addon or new feature added, or just to let know the users we are alive and well and actively working to improve the service.

Another question, can you get hooked on twitter? I think you can – some people are hooked and go over the top every day, tweeting 20+ times a day – you know who you are! It just make twitter noisy. How can you compete with someone tweeting and retweeting (RT) rubbish all day long?

Is twitter friend or foe? Mostly friend but it has it’s ulgy side too.

O (Fluffy) sent me this..

And I found this on despair.com – nice summary of the social networks

I got the munchies last week .. the cupboards where kinda empty but I remembered there was an Easter egg left over.. not from this year.. but last year.

So here we have it.. the pros and cons:

• it’s WAY out of date..(27/05/08)
• it’s organic chocolate
• it’s marks and sparks
• it’s wrong to eat it.. coz it’s not my Easter egg (it’s L-Mans from P)
• it’s Timmy the Tractor.. I like tractors

So should I eat it? Or maybe let it mature a little more?

Where would you draw the line in eating chocolate that’s out of date.. does it go off?

Went into Galway over the weekend – the city hoping with people!

Apparently some boats decided to sail from Boston to Galway city in a Volvo.. or something to that effect… hmm  anyway Leg 8 starts very soon and the boats will leave Galway.

The Irish Dragon is now in 5th place..

Meanwhile the cattle, who didn’t go see the boats,  knocked walls for me  to build (again).. and I thank you moo cows for that – you are keeping me very fit this summer!