Hotel, motel, Holiday Inn

I’ve just moved to Welling­ton, but before I did a prop­er move, work sent me up for a few days to get acquaint­ed with things, and while I was there I stayed at the Hol­i­day Inn on Feath­er­ston Street.

I was kind of excit­ed because over past 25 years, there have been many hip hop songs with men­tions of excit­ing things that hap­pen at a “hotel, motel, Hol­i­day Inn”. What extrav­a­gances would await me? Per­haps a par­ty that did­n’t stop till six in the morn­ing…

The Welling­ton Hol­i­day Inn is a nice, new hotel, and every­thing felt new and shiny and prob­a­bly a bit more lux­u­ri­ous than it’ll even­tu­al­ly feel in a few years’ time. The hotel rooms either face the har­bour or the Bee­hive, and the build­ing is clev­er­ly designed so that the room win­dows are angled to face the best part of the view. So rather than hav­ing some non-descript office build­ing in my face, I could lie in bed and gaze out at the Bee­hive and the hills of Thorn­don. Aww.…

There were two notable things about the room:

1. The opaque bath­room win­dow It looks real­ly dra­mat­ic, but the prob­lem is that while it’s opaque, you can still make out a lot of details from the room side (I did exper­i­ments with my cam­era on auto­timer). So it might be OK so see your sweet­ie’s sexy sil­hou­ette, but you prob­a­bly don’t want to see your mum. Or vice ver­sa. So they’ve put a blind up to pre­serve mod­esty.

2. The choco­late design theme Ok, so there’s a lot of dark brown in the room, which is cool because it’s fair­ly fash­ion­able at the moment and it’s nice­ly done so it’s not over­whelm­ing. But some­thing has gone wrong with the art — it’s a pho­to of Guylian choco­late seashells, WTF. It’s like some­one has thought, “Hmm. There’s a lot of choco­late colour in the room, so let’s con­tin­ue that theme with a pho­to of some super­mar­ket choc­cies!!!! lolz!!!!” But what’s worse is that Hol­i­day Inn has total­ly missed an oppor­tu­ni­ty by not stock­ing Guylian choco­lates in the mini­bar. Despite there being eight pil­lows per bed, there was an addi­tion­al pil­low menu avail­able — you rang House­keep­ing and they’d bring you your choice of a pil­low (rub­ber, feath­er, etc). This sounds real­ly lux­u­ri­ous and extrav­a­gant, but it’s lit­tle more fan­cy than ring­ing up and ask­ing for anoth­er blan­ket. And who has spe­cial pil­low needs? I don’t. (Per­haps I should.)

There was some­thing weird going on with the room’s air-con­di­tion­ing. The remote con­trol was dif­fi­cult to use — even fol­low­ing the instruc­tions that had evi­dent­ly been cre­at­ed for hotel guests. And even when the AC was going and air of a pleas­ing tem­per­a­ture was flow­ing out of it, it did­n’t seem to actu­al­ly affect the whole room, leav­ing it feel­ing stuffy and hot. I did­n’t use the room ser­vice, but I was impressed that they had a cheap­er ver­sion of it, where they’d deliv­er you the food in take­out paper bags, sav­ing them the return vis­it of col­lect­ing your used plates (and free­ing them up to deliv­er pil­lows).