The Angsana Bintan Resorts & Spa (hereinafter referred to as ‘Angsana’) is a hotel located in Lagoi Bay in Bintan Island. ‘Angsana’ is a sister brand of Banyan Tree Hotels & Resorts.
Angsana Bintan’s swimming pool is illuminated by dramatic lighting at night
If someone were to ask me if I’d recommend this place to them, I doubt if I can give a definitive answer. Instead, I will probably just enumerate what I liked and disliked about the place and let that person make his own decision.
First off, let’s get the nasty stuff out of the way:
So you’re finally going to that long-awaited holiday to Paris. You need to book a hotel room. Fast. The problem is, you don’t know where to stay. You don’t have much time to search the internet because you have a lot of work to clear up before you go on leave. Plus, you have a budget to work with. But at the same time, you’d like to be as thorough as possible because it’s not everyday you get to go on a holiday and you’d like to stay in a hotel that will make the most out of your budget.
Sound familiar? Yup, we’ve all been through that scenario. And the usual solution is to type in the search box “+Paris +hotel”. As soon as you hit [ENTER], you are immediately hit by a barrage of sites that all claim to offer the best deals and the best hotel rates in face of the earth. You wearily plod through each link, write down notes on hotel names, their locations, their rates and the hotel search sites where you found them. The whole process is time-consuming, arduous, and can be very frustrating.
Allow me to make a small simulation of this process.
With Google as my main search engine, on top of the results list is Booking.com. Like most people do, I click on it first because it’s on the top of the list, afterall.
At Booking.com’s site, I enter the check-in and check-out dates and Booking.com immediately lists down hotels with available rooms on those dates. I then have the option of sorting the hotes by popularity or by price for single or double room. Booking.com’s site is pretty decent because it includes guest reviews, as well as maps. My only grouse is that the prices are listed in the currency of your destination (in the case of Paris: the Euro) so I still have to find a way to convert the prices into Malaysian Ringgit.
I find among Booking.com’s list a small hotel called Hotel de la Vallee. It’s a 1-star affair, you have to pay E2.50 to have a shower (!), but it only costs E62 per night and the location sounds very promising: “5 minutes away from Chatelet-Les Halles metro station, 10 minutes away from Le Musée Du Louvre and 15 minutes away from Notre Dame”. It’s in the 1st arrondissement, afterall — practically in the heart of Paris.
So I double-checked the rates with Expedia.com because they’re having a summer sale until 31st July. They’ve also got the search-by-budget option although they list their prices in US Dollars. Unfortunately, I didn’t like the way their system handled searches. It felt a lot like using Windows’ troubleshooter — they met my search criteria, but could not quite give me what I was looking for. I was expecting a lot from — and ended up sorely disappointed in — Expedia, knowing that it has been featured by Fortune Magazine as the 3rd most admired Internet companies in the United States (after IAC and Google), followed by Amazon.com at 4th place.
Then I found HotelsCombined.com. I love the clean, uncluttered look of their site. I also love their tag line: “One Site To Search Them All”. But what I love the most is their concept of searching on your behalf 30+ hotel reservation websites simultaneously and listing down the sites with their respective rates.
When I searched for Hotel de la Vallee on HotelsCombined.com, it churned out the results quickly. And it confirmed that I, indeed, got the best rate through Booking.com (RM277.22 per night). I could have saved myself a lot of time and hassle if I just used this site in the first place!
Other features I love about HotelsCombined.com: the option to change the currency and the option to specify an upper and lower limit for the hotel rates to suit your budget. Their site also comes with the standard brief description, some photos, as well as the possibility of sorting the results by price, location, user rating, etc.
Anyway, back to the hotel issue, I thought of searching for another hotel that can match Hotel de la Vallee’s rate. Naturallement, I used HotelsCombined.com to do the search and, for the dates that I specified (1st-10th August), I got Allstar Residence de la Seine Aparthotel Paris (from RM276.20 per night from Hotel-Board.com). But for the same price, I’d much rather go for Hotel de la Vallee, as it’s nearer to public transport and the Louvre!
The Nokia N82 comes chock-full of features — a 5-megapixel camera with real Xenon flash and Carl Zeiss optics, N-gage gaming, Nokia maps, one-click upload of photos to sites such as Flickr, music player, RealPlayer, bluetooth and WiFi capabilities, among other things.
But the one thing that I love doing the most with it is surfing the web. I’ve also tried it in various spots around KL and it picks up WLAN signals effortlessly. The web browser is easy to use, automatically re-formatting websites to fit its 2.4-inch QVGA screen. Simply turn the phone sideways and the display automatically switches from portrait to landscape mode. In short, it works like a dream.
The photograph below shows the actual size of the Nokia N82.
You want to check email? No problem. Gmail mobile is included in the preloaded bookmarks.
Feeling the urge to update your status in Facebook? Easy-peasy with the N82.
Got a new post for your WordPress blog? You can create a new post from practically anywhere with the N82. The WordPress dashboard looks slightly askew on the N82’s screen, but it’s still possible to create, edit or preview posts like normal, unlike the Dopod 838 Pro which totally screws up the whole thing.
Need to find a Charlotte North Carolina dentist but don’t have access to a desktop PC? Just Google it up with the N82!
Even if the sites that you want to browse are not formatted for mobile devices, they still turn out quite well in the N82’s screen.
It also handles videos from sites like YouTube Mobile very well.
You cannot access drop-down menus with the N82 though, so forget about buying a ticket from KLM’s site with this diminutive phone. AirAsia Mobile, on the other hand, works perfectly well with both the N82 and Dopod 838 Pro, as the site substitutes radio buttons for drop-down menus.
Just keep in mind that websurfing uses up a lot of battery, so make sure you turn off WLAN scanning when not in use.
The Nokia N82’s not without its flaws, but I love it for its weight, size and ease of use when it comes to surfing.
When it comes to hotels, I’m always on the lookout for three things: cleanliness, location, and value for money. Luckily, in Europe, it is possible to get all three, unlike in Asia, where 1-star or no-star hotels compromise a lot on the cleanliness aspect. Hôtel Central in Geneva fulfilled all three of these criteria and more. When DH and I stayed there on our first ever trip to Geneva in 1999, I remembered it to be clean and well-located, and I found the prices to be very reasonable by Geneva standards because the hotels there are very, very expensive. I’m happy to confirm with you that my memory didn’t fail me.
Cleanliness
The rooms and toilets were all clean and well-maintained. The sheets and towels were immaculate white. Hôtel Central passes with flying colours in the cleanliness criteria.
Location, Location, Location
I find Hôtel Central’s location to be very convenient indeed. It’s very close to a tram stop and a bus stop (both known as ‘Bel-Air’). You can go anywhere in Geneva to and from the hotel very easily, thanks to Switzerland’s excellent public transport system, coupled with the free Geneva Transport Card card. 
There are plenty of shops and restaurants all around, including an H&M outlet, a small art gallery and the Confédération Centre Shopping Mall. A Migros outlet for your grocery needs is about 3 minutes away in Rue Molard. There’s even a charming small fresh market (marked marché in the map above) in the daytime not far from Migros, where they sold crepes, fresh fruits and vegetables (including round eggplants slightly bigger than a baseball and artichokes bigger than my fist!), fresh pasta and cheeses.
The hotel is right smack in the centre of Geneva’s Old Town, so most of the attractions can be reached on foot. The lake (and the Jet d’Eau) is less than 5 minutes away. The Flower Clock is less than 10 minutes away. The main train station, Gare Cornavin (on the upper left hand side of the map), is about 5 minutes away. But if you have luggage with you, you’d be better off taking the bus to Gare Cornavin.
Like I said, it’s all about the location and Hotel Central scores a perfect 10 in this category for me.
Value for Money
Hôtel Central gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “value for money,” as they offer several room options to suit your budget. Continue Reading »
Lola and I flew on KLM all the way for our whirlwind European escapade, except for the Geneva-Paris leg of the journey, which we did on the TGV (Train de Grand Vitesse, literally: “train of great speed”). I’ll deal with the TGV experience on another post soon.
The in-flight menu was quite pathetic for this trip, but I really, really, really love KLM’s internet check-in feature that allows you to check-in for your flight as early as 30 hours beforehand! You simply go to KLM’s website, enter your booking code or e-ticket number and your flight number, pick out your seat, print out your boarding pass, and voila! You are checked in.
If you have no luggage to check-in, just report at the gate at least 30 minutes before departure time (although it feels a wee bit too risky for me!). Otherwise, just bring your boarding pass and drop off your luggage at least 60 minutes before departure time.
For the KL-Amsterdam sector, we flew on a Boeing 747-400 aircraft and I was quite pleased with the seats that I picked out for Lola and I — 63H & K. Seats 63 to 66 are arranged as two-somes, i.e. two seats per row instead of the usual three, so there was extra space beside the window seat (K) for hand luggage. If you’re the type who likes to lean on the window to sleep, you may not like this, but I liked the feeling of extra space beside me. And if you happen to be travelling alone, it’s a convenient way of making sure you have adequate space between you and the person seating beside you, so that you don’t end up accidentally leaning on him/her once you doze off.
DH actually flew with us to Amsterdam (and later on, to Geneva) but, unfortunately, when I checked-in online for the three of us, I could not get three seats next to each other. So he had to sit behind us, right next to a Dutch gentleman who turned out to be a historian.
I wanted to get for us the seats with extra legroom (35BC & HJ and 51BC & HJ were available at that time) but then I found out that we’d have to fork out an extra 50 Euros each for those ’special’ seats. End of ‘brilliant’ plan right then and there…
Seatguru.com has the standard layout of KLM’s Boeing 747-400 here, for your easy reference.
What KLM lacked in the palatability of their food, they more than made up for with their flight attendants’ service level and attentiveness to passenger needs. They were friendly, helpful and smiling and really left a good impression on me.
I was quite perplexed by their beverage policy though: passengers who asked for beer got a full tin of Heineken every time, but passengers who asked for a Coke or Sprite got a mere cupful, which is, like, half a tin. Then I searched the internet and found out that Heineken and Air France-KLM have a three-year exclusive marketing partnership effective December 2007. That pretty much cleared up the issue for me.
In-flight entertainment is nothing compared to Emirates Air, as each passenger in Emirates Air — even in Economy — gets their own personal screen and watch movies on demand — as in, you can start, stop, rewind, fast-forward through a movie anytime. KLM still utilises one of those mini-TV screen-like monitors suspended from the ceiling every few meters or so, so when a passenger in front of you gets up to go to the loo or stretch out, they tend to block the view. You have to crane your neck to watch the movie, if you are vertically-challenged, which is not very nice for a 12-hour flight. But then again, it was a night flight and I spent most of it sleeping (somehow, I managed to sleep!) so it wasn’t such a big deal for me.
As a whole, I was still pretty pleased with our long-haul flight experience with KLM. Their routing is perfect for this particular trip, the service was excellent, the timing and frequency of the flights suited our schedule, and, best of all, we got an unbelievably good deal with the airfare: RM2,800 for KL-Amsterdam-Geneva, Paris-Amsterdam-KL plus a little over RM1,600 for taxes (but non-refundable, non-reroutable, non-exchangeable, dates unchangeable and had to be booked months in advance).
I’ll definitely fly with KLM again in the future.
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