Small Luxury Hotels

I love it when I find hidden treasures in book sales.  It’s the one thing that makes being called a cheapass worth all the hassle.  Case in point, I found a book called “small luxury hotels” in a Powerbooks sale last month and picked it up for a cool 149 pesos.  It was basically an overgrown brochure for a company that specializes in marketing smaller, lesser known hotels, but I’ll be damned if those pictures of endless beaches and beautiful hotels weren’t captivating.  i bought it in the sirit of things to come, kind of like “well, when i’m filthy rich here’s some of the places I’d like to hit.”

I find out after browsing the book some more that they have a website, so I log on and sign up, and the cool thing is that when you’re a member and you book throught heir site, you get to choose all sorts of shit when booking.  Like you can choose what kinds of linen and pillows you want, and the best thing  is you get a complimentary room upgrade if they’re available.  I figure there’s lots of sites like this right, like hotel aggregators ike hotelclub.net, which I recently used to book our shanghai hotel (I got a $15 coupon off of our insight guide book to hanoi), so it’s no big deal.  But just two days ago I got an envelope from Small luzury hotels’ offices in England with a membershi card in it.  Now I don’t know about you, but there’s a psychological trigger in my brain that says “when you receive a membership card mailed from a foreign country, this must be legit.”

So now I’m sold, and when Aissa and I go to Bangkok, I’m booking us for a night in the Lebua at State Tower, where their toiletries ar Bvlgari and they have a Conde Nast accredited chef (not that I know what that means).  Yeah, I said a night.  I may be sold on the concept, but I’m still not filthy rich.  Still, I figure we save a lot of money from booking budget accomodations for most of our trips, and it’d be nice to relax in luxury, even for just a night.