hotels

Hotels for Book Lovers

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The New York Times has a piece today on hotels that book lovers would enjoy visiting:

Yet when the books don’t belong to an individual, but rather to a hotel or a bar, it is not armchair psychology — it is an invitation to a chance encounter. Which book might catch your eye from the shelves at the Wine Library at the B2 Boutique Hotel & Spa in Zurich, where guests can browse some 33,000 books with a glass of white in hand? What books might be in your room in the Library Hotel in New York where each floor celebrates one of the 10 categories of the Dewey Decimal System and a reading room is open 24 hours? Which volume will be brought to your table at the Gryphon, a cafe in Savannah, Ga., where diners receive their bill tucked inside the pages of a book? Might any of these books change your trip, your mind, your life?

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Oregon has several such spots, such as the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport, where rooms are separated into Best Sellers, Classic and Novels, and there’s a library but no Wi-Fi or television in the rooms. There’s also the Heathman Hotel in Portland, which, with more than 2,700 books, has one of the largest autographed libraries in the world in partnership with Powell’s Books, the country’s largest independent bookstore.

I have added Gryphon and The Library Hotel on my to-visit lists. What other hotels should book lovers visit that weren’t profiled in this piece?

A Hotel Room With 140 Characters

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

I can’t decide whether this idea for a “140 Character Hotel” is genius (or ridiculous):

The first “Twitter experience hotel” (aka Sol Wave House) was introduced this summer in Majorca, Spain, where guests can ping requests to a “Twitter concierge” using hashtags like #fillmyfridge; flirt from poolside Bali beds by tweeting numbers printed atop the beds, like “How’s it going #balibed10?”; and sip cocktails while checking their smartphones for a live feed of virtual conversations bubbling up from every corner of the hotel.

Meliá Hotels International, which owns more than 350 properties, including Sol Wave House, is pioneering the concept amid the still rising popularity of smartphones and social networking. The Internet is in more pockets today than ever before. In July the International Data Corporation, a research group, said the worldwide smartphone market experienced 52.3 percent year-over-year growth. (In the United States, 56 percent of adults own a smartphone, up from 35 percent in 2011, according to the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project surveys.)

That sandbox includes a Twitter concierge that guests can instruct via tweet to “Get the Cava on ice” followed by “1 bottle, 4 glasses to the solarium,” as one visitor did last month. There are images of mustaches on mirrors in the rooms, encouraging guests to tweet goofy selfies. And on Friday afternoons at the height of the season, the concierge uses a pool party hashtag (#twitterpoolparty) to summon sun worshipers.

On second thought: the few times I’ve stayed in hotels and had a negative experience, tweeting something publicly was the fastest way to get an amicable resolution.

This is an actual line used in the Times article: “For the foreseeable future, though, the Twitter hotel is #heretostay.”