Interesting Facts

The highly successful travel website Trip Advisor was founded in February 2000 in a small office above a pizza shop called Kosta’s in Needham, Massachusetts, USA. (15 years later and the reviews on the site now have more than 10 billion words, that's nearly 12,000 times the number of words in the complete works of Shakespeare. The most reviewed city is London – with over 1.8 million reviews of the city’s hotels, restaurants and attractions.)

The organising committee for the London 2012 Games, Locog, revealed yesterday that it had over-estimated by a quarter the number of rooms needed by officials, media and sponsors. It has now handed back 120,000 of the total 600,000 nights booked for the sporting event. (These needless reservations could be a key factor in a tourism slump set to cost Britain billions over the Olympics. Analysis for The Independent suggests up to one million beds will now go unsold over the Olympic period. One trade association estimated income could slump by up to £3.5bn during July and August! So much for Olympic gold.) Source: The Independent

Russian engineers announced plans to put a hotel into orbit 200 miles above Earth by 2016. (A four-room, so called Hotel in the Heavens, will house up to seven guests who will be able to watch us mere mortals, as our planet turns beneath them. However it will cost them; space tourists will have to fork out £500,000 to travel on a Soyuz rocket to get to the hotel before stumping up a further £100,000 for a five-day stay. I suggest they get told it will cost them £1 million pounds to get back down.) Source

According to the Daily Telegraph, it costs an average of £667 to keep a prisoner overnight in a London cell. (It only costs £395 a night to stay at the Dorchester. Maybe the best way to cut crime is to present the prisoner with a bill at the end of his / her stay.)

Travelodge have come up with a new concept in camping. No more tents, and midnight trips to the loo, they have created a prefabricated mobile hotel room. (It has all the facilities of their standard room, including a luxury double bed, bedside lights, duvet, pillows, fully carpeted floor, window blinds, dressing table & light, mirror, chair, flat screen TV, DVD player with a collection of DVD's, air conditioning, heater, bedside lights and a illuminated headboard, tea / coffee making facilities, washroom with bio-degradable toilet and washbasin with running water. The cost? A mere £26 a night. But it's no good asking them to deliver it to the top of Mount Everest, it will only be available at main events like music festivals and sporting competitions.) Source: Daily Mail

US Secret Service sniffer dogs are put up in five-star hotels during overseas presidential visits. (Sam wants to know where he can apply. He can sniff out a dog treat within 2 minutes.)

Britons take home 430,000 gallons (1.95m litres) of shampoo from hotels every year, a survey has found. (Seemingly this amount of shampoo would fill more than 14,000 bathtubs.)

According to the Economist newspaper the 88-storey Shanghai Grand Hyatt Hotel in China, has the world's longest laundry chute. (The hotel is located on the 53rd to 88th floors of the Jin Mao Building which is the worlds 3rd tallest building, but the laundry chute runs down the full length of the tower to the basement, and incorporates buffers to slow down the laundry during its descent. Weeeeeh!)