Personal

How NOT to manage a customer relationship

Accor AdvantageFor the past eight years, I’ve paid for membership in Accor Hotel’s Advantage Plus loyalty scheme.  For a little under three hundred bucks a year I’m entitled to:

  • Up to 50% discount when dining in participating hotels and restaurants
  • One night’s complimentary accommodation that can be used at participating hotels across Asia Pacific
  • Exclusive Member’s Only special offers and a minimum 10% discount off the best rate of the day available to the general public for accommodation
  • Automatic enrolment in “A Club” at silver level so you can earn 50% more points
  • Earn and redeem points at more than 2,000 Accor hotels worldwide
  • Priority access and special offers for major tours, attractions and events plus Europcar
  • Dedicated member’s website and call centre.

(taken from their web site)

In general, I’ve been happy with this.  I’ve travelled away from home often enough each year to justify the cost.  I’ve enjoyed the convenience of just calling the booking service to get a room reserved handy.

But (there always seems to be a ‘but’ doesn’t there?)…

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New photos added to Flickr

imageI’ve been adding some new photos to my flickr account today.

After recently getting a new scanner that can handle slides (more about that in another article) I’ve started scanning all my old slides (I have thousands).

To start with, I’m working through the photos I took during my time working in Antarctica.  Don’t worry, I’m not going to inflict the whole collection on anyone, I’m just picking out a selection that I like.

imageUnfortunately, the years haven’t been exceedingly kind to my slides.  It’s about 20 years since I took many of these photos.  In some cases, they were then ‘home developed’ in the dark room that was available to Antarctic expeditioners on the bases.  I guess they’ve actually survived pretty well but colours are starting to shift.  Either that, or my memory of how the colours are supposed to have looked has shifted I guess.

Anyway, you can see the latest additions here (with this blog wrapped around them) or go directly to my flickr page here.

Enjoy.

Holidays with Dogs

imageLast Christmas my wife, Meredith, and I decided to go away over Christmas.  Normally, we’d leave our dog with someone to be looked after but this time it wasn’t really a good option.  Time to find somewhere “pet friendly” to stay.

One of the first things I learned is that “pet friendly” seems to be a loose translation for “we don’t mind if you bring your dog along but it isn’t allowed inside anything (house, shed, carport, etc) and we don’t have any fences anywhere“.  Needless to say this wasn’t our idea of pet friendly. More →

Welcome Aboard

I’ve been thinking about doing this for many months.  Tonight, I found myself with some time to spare and decided the time had come.

In the past I’ve created other custom wordpress themes for some of our clients (e.g. http://www.westechfielddays.com.au/, http://www.broncobrandingaustralia.com/) and had always thought that setting up WordPress for myself should also involve creating a theme for the site.  Unfortunately, I just never got the time.  I’m over it, I downloaded a theme and decided to go with that instead.  For now at least, who knows what the future will bring?

This is really just a rambling post so there’s some (minimal) content while I’m settling in and unpacking the boxes… expect more to come.