Blog

April in England.

The things that have been occupying our minds in recent weeks are breakfast and weekends.  I think the purple hotels now offer not only the best, but the best value, breakfast in the entire hotel industry in the UK and if you have evidence to the contrary please let me know. For £7.95 you get everything from fresh natural yoghurt and fresh fruit salad to bacon, beans and eggs and a choice of two tortillas, that’s Spanish omelettes, one vegetarian and one meat. I don’t know what it is that always makes me think I’m going to have the healthy stuff; the fruit salad, the yoghurt, the high fibre cereal and then makes me go straight to the hot plate and have a wedge of tortilla and maybe a bit of bacon on the side. Oh well, a little of what you fancy does you good.  The point is though that breakfast shouldn’t cost half as much as the room. We want the purple breakfast to be the same good value as the purple room. So, let me know what you think. 

Moving on, very shortly we will be launching the campaign for the real weekend. You can sign up here today if you want. Where it came from is this. Various recent studies, the one I looked at was from the Henley Centre for Forecasting, were making a very interesting point that whilst we’re all getting wealthier it seems that we’re not getting happier and that the price we pay for increased affluence is less quality time to do the things that please us; spending time with family and friends, going off and doing something wacky – just getting a bit of ‘me’ time. 

I don’t think we’re about to go the French route and have a 38 hour working week and 6 week holidays every year but maybe we need to become a little bit more American. They’re really good at taking a day here, two days there to extend weekends and public holidays into longer breaks without impacting overly on their holiday entitlement. Our contribution to that is to redefine the weekend. Who says it has to be Saturday and Sunday? The shops are all open on both, pubs have all day hours now. We think the weekend is anytime between Thursday and Monday and we’ll be offering weekend rates on all four nights for any length of stay of two nights or more. So call in ‘well’ and take a spontaneous bit of ‘you’ time this weekend (see February blog for concept of calling in ‘well’ to work). If you’ve signed up for the campaign we’ll send you a brochure. If you haven’t, just click here and we’ll still send you a brochure. The credit crunch is a state of mind. Don’t borrow more than you can afford to pay back and it doesn’t exist and don’t get railroaded into working harder and harder and longer and longer hours only to feel less happy at the end of it. You need some chill time and so do I. See you next month.