Originally Posted by
JohnnyColombia
...However a number of hotels (in Bogotá mainly) have begun to follow a trend of wearing their gay friendly credentials on their sleeves by hanging giant gay rainbows outside their hotel. So I wrote to one and asked for an explanation.
The reply was "Most of our customers are European and North American and recognise that the rainbow flags at our hotel identify us as an establishment that has a gay-friendly policy, the flags act as a magnet for international tourists"
Do they really?
IME, yes on the magnet functionality.
Originally Posted by
JohnnyColombia
So the question, if you as a heterosexual FTer were booked by an agent into a hotel adorned with rainbows, would your first impression be that it was an exclusively gay place? Would you expect your travel agent to send you an email explaining the curious manifestation of the hotel's gay friendly policy beforehand?
Probably not exclusively, but definitely focused. And, no, I wouldn't expect the TA to inform me of such. I expect a TA to book me in a hotel of the style and quality that I've asked of them at a fair price. The real question to me is not the flags on the outside but if it also affects the guest behavior or the facilities on the inside. If I'm looking for a laid back pool scene then finding myself in a crazy party atmosphere - straight or gay - is going to annoy me. But you won't really know how that plays out until you can see what the long-term effects of having the flags out front does to the type of clientele which shows up as guests.
By way of qualifying my views here, I'm a straight guy who has lived in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan for 10 years now so that might also make me more comfortable around the rainbow flags; I've been living that for a decade.