My favorite hotel blog is HotelChatter.com, not only for their trendy reporting and cool hotel reviews, but for their sense of humor.

I just read the following blog titled: “Are you in favor of Self-Service Hotels?”  You can read it here.

At first I thought it was a joke, like the classic “Guests ‘Must be Naked’ at Germany’s First Nudist Hotel” blog with its hilarious “No Testicles on Seats” photo (see below).

But, no.  Reading on I discovered they were serious.  They really are installing check in kiosks at hotels, like at the airport. Am I sounding like George Bush when he saw his first supermarket scanner?

Don’t know about you but when we check in, we want to get info, negotiate an upgrade, and get someone to help with the bags and show us the room.  How’s the kiosk going to do THAT?

Just this weekend I took the younger kid to a golf tournament in San Diego.  I made my reservation online for a double queen facing away from the freeway.  We get there and there is a Baptist church convention with about 300 parishioners that just checked in.  The front desk fellow says that the room type is not guaranteed and all he can give me is a single with a roll away.   After seeing my 17-year old kid’s 6-foot frame and the $20 that I slid across the counter, he was able to find me his “last” double queen (which was reserved months ago by the pastor and his wife—I guess they got the cot).  Now please tell me.  How do I get that done with a kiosk?

So for us, the answer is no. We want full service hotels, preferably without parking or the phony “resort fee,” which is just a way to extract another twenty bucks from us.

You want to talk to a nice front desk person and avoid the “rip-off fee”?  Then you know where to stay here in Temecula.

See you soon,

Claudio