As we occasionally do, Julie and I spent a couple of hours today working in the lovely bar at the Kempinski Hotel San Lawrenz. I think it’s the only five star hotel on Gozo, and despite its peculiar location (there are no views of the sea), it’s quite posh.
I wasn’t using the web, but I happened to visit the hotel’s portal page for its wifi service. Here it is:
That looks pretty weak, doesn’t it? Why does a five-star hotel, with its spa smelling of sandalwood and lavendar, it’s beautifully-tiled pools and gorgeously-appointed rooms, have such a crappy-looking login page? The Kempinski isn’t unique in this peculiar disconnect–I’ve seen worse in plenty of four and five-star hotels.
It’s a tiny thing, but swish hotels aspire to get the tiny things right. The five-star devil, after all, is in the details. On the other hand, at least I wasn’t presented with an image of some kind of fruitophile.
Incidentally, I took that screenshot with a great little OS X program that Monique tipped me off on. It’s called Paparazzi, and all it does is make a full-length screenshot of any URL you enter. It saves you the trouble of stitching screenshots together.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
And for those PC users out there – there’s a Firefox plugin called Screengrab that does the same thing: http://www.screengrab.org/
It works great!
Well, at least the drinks are good at the Kempinsky.
Do you realise that Scoble is tracking back to your starfish diagram?
http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/02/social-media-starfish/
The short answer is that they generally outsource their WiFi since they have no idea how that Internets thing works.
Interestingly, when I was in Barcelona this year the Hotel Princessa Sophia used a company based out of New Brunswick to manage their WiFi authentication.