David J. Danto

Business travel thoughts in my own, personal opinion

eMail: ddanto@IMCCA.org Follow Industry News: @NJDavidD

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“Spring Break Grab Bag”

A trip report about the last ten days of my life, with no names changed as no one is innocent…

I just flew home and as the old joke goes, boy are my arms tired. Actually all of me is tired, as this trip was some business, some vacation, some on my own and some with my wife. I have a lot to comment on – but none of it is on the same topic – so this blog takes the form of a trip report / grab bag. I have lots to say about a bunch of unrelated things.

My trip started (as most of mine do) on United at EWR. I was scheduled for a simple flight to Orlando to attend an industry conference (Enterprise Connect – and if anyone is interested in what happened at the conference feel free to read that blog and hear that podcast here.) We were lined-up to board the scheduled 9:33 am flight – and I was jazzed to have scored (paid for) an upgrade on an internationally configured business class 757 – which on United means I can watch an on-demand movie from the IFE system. Instead of letting us on the plane however, we saw the captain and crew get off the plane and walk out of the gate. The gate agents were reporting a “slight delay” which made the captain shake his head and walk over to us very frequent travelers and say [essentially] ‘slight delay my butt.’ His actual words were “they told us there is ‘wing damage’ and we needed to ‘get off.’” (It was a refreshing change for a United uniformed employee not to lie to us.) Of course the aircraft was taken out of service for maintenance. Thankfully, after a handful more ‘ten minute delays’ we were directed to a new gate with a new aircraft. As we were boarding that bird, the captain and agents told us a number of times that there’d be “no service” on the flight, as turbulence was expected to be heavy all the way. Great – pay for a first class upgrade, get no first class service – typical United. In any case I was happy to be on my way only a few hours late. (As an aside, I wrote to United asking for a refund of the upgrade fee as I received no service, and they wrote back to me saying that because I sat in a first class seat and got to my destination, they owe me no refund, but ‘because they like me’ they gave me one anyway – in the form of a voucher.)

I arrived and checked-in at the conference hotel – The Gaylord Palms, a property I’m very familiar with – which for the last few years has been in the Marriott family. As a Hilton Diamond it’s probably the only Marriott that I regularly stay at. It’s a spectacularly beautiful property – with an indoor garden / jungle in the atrium, full of plants, trees, gators, fish, etc. It is also sadly just about the only property in the Orlando area – a city where you can’t spit without hitting a decent hotel that costs less than $100 a night – that charges nearly $400 a night for a room. It is the host hotel and convention center every year for said Enterprise Connect conference– and because I’m involved in that show with very early appointments, I have no choice but to stay there and pay it (I’ll get back to that point later.) It is also ironic that as the host property for this business communication and collaboration conference, one can’t get a decent in-room internet signal. I had to spend the week connecting with my LTE hotspot as the WiFi was worse than useless. It’s been that way for years. I complained…I tweeted…they did nothing – same old Gaylord Palms.

My wife joined me as the conference ended so we could spend a few days on vacation after the show. It was our plan to stay with friends in the Ft. Lauderdale area, then fly to Nassau in the Bahamas for three days, then fly home.

We had wanted to visit Atlantis at Paradise Island for the first time, but couldn’t find a price we thought was reasonable – and then discovered why. Our timing coincided with Spring Break – something we hadn’t planned on. With some good advice from Joe Brancatelli I found out that the resort is also now part of the Marriott system, and I could use 80K Marriott points (received from the past few years of overpriced stays at the Gaylord Palms) to get two nights at the Atlantis Royal Tower. I booked the historic Hilton British Colonial for the day/night we’d arrive in Nassau, then we could move to Atlantis the next day. I had never been there before and was looking forward to finally seeing it.

We also hadn’t planned on my wife getting a cold and not having it be fully through her system as she joined me. We couldn’t stay with our friends in good conscience and potentially spread those germs, so we looked for a nearby hotel to their beachfront property near FTL. Did I mention that it was Spring Break? The close hotels were outrageously priced, and ones 45 minutes away were also so overpriced that I used Hilton points to avoid paying exorbitant prices for a Hampton Inn (that wound up costing only a few points less than the historic property on Nassau.) It was a last minute booking, and I was thankful I had enough points to do it.

When we put this trip together I found it impossible to get a reasonable itinerary on United from FTL to NAS, so we flew one-way on JetBlue. It was a decent experience – far less so than before they squeezed their seats smaller than they used to be – but OK. I felt stupid to have purchased their ‘fast access’ service, only discovering at the airport that there is no ‘faster’ access for anyone when checking-in / checking bags, and that the ‘faster’ security line I paid for was not as fast as the Pre-Check lane we qualified for anyway. (I’d have loved a better explanation of that on their website before I purchased the tickets.) When we got through security we saw the following scene:

I’ve experienced bad airports before (heck, I’m a United flyer as you know) but I’d never experienced a constant sea of humanity like the one we saw here as we walked down the corridor to the E gates. If there is an occupancy guideline for this terminal I’m definitely sure we exceeded it by triple. Forget getting a seat at your gate, good luck getting a seat anywhere…wait in a 15 minute line to buy a snack. I hope this isn’t the usual experience for this terminal.

When we arrived in Nassau we took a taxi to the Hilton. It is a historic but very dated property. We had arranged for an ocean view room, and that’s what we received. The views were beautiful – of the cruise ship parking lot.

There was nothing wrong with that view of course, it’s just not something you see every day. The British Colonial Hilton – despite its age and wear – treated us well, gave us breakfast, had strong internet, and was an excellent rest stop on the way to Atlantis.

Arriving at Atlantis for the first time, we were given a very nice upgraded room when we checked-in. We were also given a half-dozen coupons that can be used to get two free bottles of water from any food service venue. These are apparently discretionary currency at check-in, so be sure to ask for your share if you go there. After bringing our bags to the room we went outside to explore the grounds. To say the property was massive would be an understatement. I’ve stayed at large resorts before, but I’ve never experienced one with the signage as bad as it is there. The fold-out map they gave us was good for showing the relationship of locations, but useless for helping one get around. The instructions to ‘download their app’ were a wild goose chase, as there was no app, other than for the Atlantis property in Dubai. We spent half the time we could have spent in water walking around trying not to be lost. Here’s one great example. Atlantis offers two ‘lazy river’ rides – a slow one that it took us a half hour to find (as each set of directions from workers we asked conflicted with the last) and a ‘rapids’ one – which no one told us has eight different entrances and one exit different from all the entrances. Finding our way back to the entrance where our stuff was located required a security guard and a half hour of walking barefoot on hot concrete. One simple sign that said “Be Aware That You Will Get Off This Pool At A Different Spot and Your Items Are here At Entrance 8” would have saved a lot of grief. Actually, any usable directions anywhere would have saved a lot of grief. One of the days we got on a shuttle bus to go to a restaurant. The driver said to get off at one stop, a passenger said to get off at a different stop, and a second passenger said it’s stupid not to just walk. I assume that for people staying here for longer than a few days they eventually figure things out, but for a brief, first experience, the lack of useable signs and directions was a huge annoyance. We enjoyed our stay despite the issues, but I’d have assumed that by now they’d have worked-out things as simple as signage.

When our short stay was over we took our friends’ advice and headed to the airport extra early to check-in and get through customs. We arrived at 8am for a 10:30 flight. We were one of maybe ten people at the airport. It was a breeze. (Note to self - sleep later next time….)

All in all I’m glad we got the time away, and managed to squeeze some fun in at the end of a business trip. We arrived home just before the fourth Nor’easter of the season hit – which was a stroke of good luck to end the trip, but a stroke of bad luck for my business trip scheduled for the next day.

This article was written by David Danto and contains solely his own, personal opinions.

All image and links provided above as reference under prevailing fair use statutes.