alect

We are planning a trip to ireland in Jul 2007. I am booking award hotels now to lock them in. For a couple of places I am booking Best Westerns using transfers from AMEX MR. Is award availability only accessed via phone? What is award availability like in Ireland usually? When does it become available - 11 months out?

So any opinions on the following properties:

Ennis Best Western
Arklow Best Western

Thanks

sdsearch

Did you forget you asked much of this a while back?

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=577383

Not much has changed in less than two months!

The website still is showing award levels through Dec 06, none for Jan 07.

The BW webiste also clearly states: "Advanced reservations are required to ensure room availability. To make your Free Room Night hotel reservation, please call one of our worldwide reservations offices."

Fairly few people here use BW for award stays (other than "using up" free gift certificates), and fewer yet do award stays a year out. So I think you should call BW customer service and ask them all these questions, if no one other than me ever replyies to your queries here.


As for opinions on the properties, have you looked them up on www.tripadvisor.com?

(I'm considering staying at the BW West County Hotel in Ennis myself during a trip this Nov -- paid rather than award stay -- but obviously even if I do I won't be able to give a report on it until after that!)

runchadrun

I could be wrong, but doesn't it make more sense to redeem your points towards BW travel cards instead of free night vouchers? With the cards you don't have to worry about award availability, you can use them at any BW, you can earn points when you use them (which is great when there's a promotion going on), you can redeem what points you have in case you don't have enough points for a free night, you can use them towards any room, and if your plans change you can always use them at a different BW.

I did some math figuring this out a few months ago and you roughly use the same number of points between a voucher for a particular hotel and cards worth how much they would charge for the room. (I hope that sentence made sense.) For example, a hotel i'm staying at in San Francisco next month is 24,000 points for a voucher for a room that I'm paying $116/night for. That same 24,000 points would get me a $100 travel card so I'm down $16 but I figure it's worth the flexibility I mention above.

alect

OOOh senility is setting in - you're right - mea culpa.

alect

That's great info. But I don't see a way to redeem Amex MRs into these travel cards - the only BW/GCCI option I see is to transfer points to the program.

runchadrun

Could you transfer your Amex points into your GCCI account, then redeem them for travel cards? (Sorry, I don't know the details of how the Amex program works.)

alect

Will look into this - thanks.

sdcarver

I believ once they are GCCI points they are your to do what you choose with, which means buying travel cards

sdcarver

alect

Yes I looked it up and once I have the GCCI points I can buy the travel cards - 20k points for US$100 card - anyone know how much for E100 card?

alect

So get this - I call up today to make award reservations (or at least check availability before I transfer my points) in Arklow & Ennis in Ireland for one night stays in Jul 2007.

Neither one had availability. For Ennis they said no more avilability. For arklow they told me not loaded yet. I couldn't believe that 10-11 months out there is no availability. This is part of a 10 day ireland trip, and all of the other nights are now booked on awards in Sheratons, Conrads, Marriotts. But BW has no availability??

They told me to make reservations and keep calling back hoping availability comes up.

The rates for the hotels are E240 and E170 - both outrageous I thought! )(are they rack rates?)

NWA747SNN

Just make sure that the rate they are quoting is per room and not per person staying in that room. Charging and quoting per person prices are common practice. The term they use is "per person sharing".

sdsearch

No, they're not rack rates. The "BEST RATE" for one person (it goes up for two!) is E150 at County Hotel in Ennis, the "STANDARD RATE" (the rack rate) is E200, and there's a "EARLY WEB SPECIAL" (no cancellations) at E127.50 for 1, E144.50 for 2.

It's called "high season". Go in November like I'm going, and the rates drop to below E90 (for one person). But half the attractions are closed, and the days are short. (OTOH the airfares are way lower, which is why I went for it! )

I suspect if you can't get award rooms, you'll get better rates if you don't restrict your search to BW (or any worldwide chains). But I don't know specifically if in those areas you can do much better with indie places or not.

sdsearch

Ok, I'm at the Ennis BW (West County Hotel) now, so now I can offer an opinion:

I reserved a room for one double bed with breakfast, and they gave me a room with a double bed plus a single bed. Is that an upgrade?

Quite decent sized room for Europe, including both a desk and a table with one chair each. Lots of good lighting. Room has a warmer and nicer look than many other "business functional" hotels. Beds aren't the best (you may feel the hard edge of the matress if you try to sit on the edge of the bed,) but for sleeping it was ok.

Nice sized bathroom. Shower has a "real" (fixed) showerhead, the first time I've seen that in Europe (usually I see the flexible ones that in the US you tend to only get in "handicapped" rooms). Soap is real too (yaay!) tho tiny, and shampoo is a flat pack that you tear open. (As opposed to BW Balboa Spain where, like at some other hotels elsewhere in Europe, there was a combination shampoo/bath gel dispenser.) There is a US style 110 V receptacle for shaver, but I couldn't get my shaver cord plug to go into it; luckily I had a Japanese plug adapter (which looks like nothing more than US two-prong to US two-prong!) and that did go in! (I have the same problem fitting that shaver cord into my US-to-UK adapter, tho no problem fitting it into my US-to-European adapters! Note: Ireland uses UK plugs, not European plugs.)

Interesting where they hide things. The hair dryer cradle is bolted to the inside of the top drawer of the desk! Luckily there's a mirror above the desk. In the cabinet under that drawer is coffee making stuff; luckily the coffee maker is not bolted down.

TV has a combination of UK and Irish channels, a slightly (but not tremendously) better variety than in other foreign hotels I've been in.

Wireless internet didn't work from the room the first night, so I had to keep going down to the lobby to use it. Tonight (my second night) it's working from my room, however. No charge for the internet either place, and not even any login required! ^

Like so often in Europe, there's no individual heat/cool controls per room. I would've liked less heat at night, but no way to set that.

Furthermore, there not great (though not awful) sound isolation. Last night a party was going in the parking lot as I was trying to get back to sleep circa 2:30 am (after sleeping a few hours), and without a heating unit on which to turn on only the fan I couldn't find a good way to mask the noise out. Similarly, if people are rowdy in the hallway (which they often have been!), you definitely hear that.

There are several restaurants, but except for the cafe the have not-paritcularly-overlapping hours. But there's a downside to so many restaurants: One of them is a combo bar/restaurant where many non-guests from the town come to party for most of the night, then go out to wait for taxis. (It was splillover from that that was the source of the noise in the parking lot last night, I'm pretty sure.)

The breakfast costs 12 Euros if you don't get it in your room rate. (Not sure which way it would work for awards.) It's somewhat less variety than I'm used to in European breakfast buffets (no cheese at all, only one type of milk), but it has at least two styles of eggs, plus some hot breakfast meats and hot tomatoes, plus fruited yogurt (this morning they had blueberry yogurt with other cut-up fruit mixed in!), cereal, a few breakfast breads, etc.

It takes maybe a dozensih minutes to briskly walk to the "happening" part of town (for restaurants, Irish music bars, etc).

Even now in November, there can be traffic jams aplenty (both in town and getting to town from the airport), because (once you get closer to Ennis and further from the airport) it's only two-lane roads without a lot of passing opportunities, and big slow trucks and such cause slow backups behind them sometimes stretching for blocks. Dunno if it can be even worse in high season? Anyway, sometimes it's faster to walk!

alpha232

Are you sure that is a single bed and not a luggage rack? That is the one thing I can not get used to, such small beds at hotels in Europe. I once had the pleasure to stay at Morrisons Island Hotel in Cork, great place though small... First night i was going to push my two singles together but found that they were mounted to the floor. Thankfully our CFO checked out the next morning and I was given his Suite, what a perk!

Most of the convenience 110v outlets are not polarized so most plugs will not fit, however the best suggestion someone made was to carry one of those 3-prong to 2-prong adapters we use for old outlets. Typically smaller than the converters but you need to make sure your hotel offers the convenience outlet.

Hope you enjoy the rest of your trip!

sdsearch

The single bed was exactly half the width of the double bed, as measured by identical pillows. That's not my problem, my problem is that it's short (either single or double). The pillow was big, and if I did not go further up on the pillow than was comfortable, my feet didn't quite fit at the other end. Wider bed doesn't solve that unless I sleep at an angle (or is that why you want the wider bed )?

Japan "A" converters are even smaller than 3-prong to 2-prong. They're basically the size of a US 2-prong plug, but it's 2-prong in and 2-prong out. All it does is "clean up" the shape of the prong (which is a bit inconsistent on US plugs) to meet the Japanese standard.

My US two-prong shaver cord plug works fine in dedicated US-to-European converters. The problem is that the UK converter I have is many-country-to-UK, and as such the mechanism to take all sorts of plugs gets confused by my shaver cord plug, even though it's not polarized, but just because the tip "rounding" is wrong or something.

As to the rest of my stay: It got better the last night (I was there 3 nights total), because there wasn't an all-night party spillover Sunday night! And the wi-fi in the room worked most of the time after the first night, tho it was down again for several hours early Sunday night.

There was one of those "impromptu" Irish trad jam sessions going on in the hotel bar early Sunday evening, that was cool! (I caught a bit of another one in a bar "downtown" Friday afternoon, but it was nice on a rainy Sunday night not to have to leave the hotel for one! ) Dunno if it happens all the time, or was only a side-effect of the Tradfest going on in Ennis that weekend.