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).