Recently, The Cranky Flier wrote about the airline El Al (which seriously sounds like it should serve flights to the planet Kypton) creating a super-low economy section by charging for services normally offered for free. This “unbundling”, as it’s known in industry parlance, would charge for things like snacks and drinks. I’m assuming there’s no upcharge for seat belts and barf bags.
And I just complained about the ludicrous prices of hotels in much of the First World – the United States is my most egregious example, but western Europe is hardly a bargain.
Why not put the ideas together? That is, unbundling hotel services. I can’t take credit for this idea – it was the ever-practical wife’s suggestion when I told her about El Al.
I’d completely be willing to forgo telephone services, irons in the room, cable TV and a bad continental breakfast. Hmm, I guess “bad continental breakfast” is redundant. I’ve always thought that first a pastry is a pastry – then it gets stale and becomes a “scone.” Once the scone solidifies into a rocklike mass surpassing diamonds on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness, it winds up on a tray in a hotel’s continental breakfast spread; only the brutally acidic coffee on display is caustic enough to break it down for consumption by some humans. But I digress.
That seems a nifty solution to what I consider the really poor values that are most hotels.
Here’s a question for you: What standard hotel services would you forego to knock some bucks off the bill?