There are two stories about the Sears Tower in the news this week. The first is a nightmare for people with vertigo… like me.
Sears Tower unveils 103rd floor glass balconies
Visitors to the Sears Tower’s new glass balconies all seem to agree: The first step is the hardest.
“It’s like walking on ice,” said Margaret Kemp, of [...]

If you have trouble figuring out what to pack for a trip then have I got a hotel for you…
Check In at Germany’s First Naked Hotel
Clothes will be strictly forbidden on the premises of Germany’s first hotel for nudists, which will open shortly in the southwestern Black Forest region. Guests will be required to remove [...]

The recent cold snap in the east changed the itinerary for cruise ship passengers who were literally left out in the cold.
No worries on board ice-bound cruise ship
A cruise ship carrying nearly 400 people has been stuck in thick ice in the St. Lawrence River in Eastern Canada for over a day, but passengers [...]

$99 a night for a hotel with the bathroom down the hall might sound a bit expensive, but in New York City any hotel for less than $100 a night is a bargain. The newly opened Jane Hotel is in a historic space in a “red lighthouse of a building in Greenwich Village”. The [...]

Here is a travel nightmare for you. You are on vacation and your travel company goes out of business. What could be worse news? How about 40,000 passengers stranded around the world.
Anger at airport as XL rescue turns into a fiasco
Stranded victims of the XL holiday firm collapse threatened to riot and scuffles broke [...]

There is a new player in the hotel review space which is TVTrip.com. TVTrip hosts video reviews of hotels. At this time they have “115 destinations, 5530 hotels, 494008 reviews, 4937 videos”. That is a very small percentage of the world’s hotels but the value of actually being able to see the hotel (if they [...]

New York City is considering a plan that would turn Bellevue hospital, the famous mental institution, into a hotel. Just think of the great marketing campaign they could run using the famous “Crazy Eddie” (is he still alive?) of New York radio commercial fame. “Come on down our prices are insane!”
Guests at Bellevue will soon [...]

The site Macenstein had an article about a UK hotel that is adding an iMac to each hotel room:
Hotel chain City Inn has decided to put a brand new iMac in every room in its London and Manchester hotels.
According to Macworld UK, City Inn has partnered with software company DirectStreams which developed a system to [...]

I booked and paid for a room using Hotwire.com last weekend and then ended up paying for a second hotel room. Why? It turns out that there is a catch with the HotWire service that you should know about.
If you are not familiar with HotWire.com it is a site that sells unsold hotel rooms at [...]

by Chris Christensen

When I was in Istanbul recently I stayed in two different hotels. The first one was a European style business hotel near Taksim. The second one was a small hotel, Hotel Historia, just behind the Sultanahmet mosque (the blue mosque). The first hotel was wonderful but was probably about twice the price of [...]