After an exhausting 4 hour shop with my niece Katharine in the Kildare Outlet Centre I collapsed exhausted (and I have shopped for Ireland in my time) into L’Officina – with just about enough energy to croak ‘Green Tea please’. My appetite for green tea being the stuff of legends, the slightly stiff €2.50 does not phase me – oh no I probably saved 10 times that by skipping Molton Brown and substituting some minor brand for office handwashing.

Frantically texting Katharine to advise  of reaching front of queue a nice young thing with suitable Italian accent presents me majestically with a green teabag and a pot of off the boil water.  The teabag, dear readers, is Lidl. Yes honestly Lidl, I saved the envelope for posterity and have emailed a link to this post to every restaurant reviewer I know (3.5). Frankly I did substitute Lidl hand wash for the Molton Brown for the duration of the recession but…. is this my punishment??

Now to those of you within easy reach of Howth or up in Donegal this will mean nothing but the best news I had this year so far is that I can by proper fresh fish from a new shop just opened in Tullamore.  Up til now I had to work out where to find the various fish vans that come in once a week with a limited and sometimes rather uninspiring selection. or worse still brave the supermarket floppies or ‘cod on Friday butchers’. Now I can call up Brendan at Cunninghams in Market Square (0873820930) and he will fetch anything really special to order or put me by another batch of really amazing turbot to tickle the taste buds.

Tullamore is about as far from the sea as you can get in Ireland.  Brendan started this enterprise on 16 December (amid  doom and gloom) with careful planning of logistics – he reckons it’s easy for him to go to the Howth market at crack of dawn and get back in time to open up for a days trading. He closes Sunday and Monday when fish is not freshly caught, presumably to catch up on sleep.

I suppose we are all working harder for success these days and he is no exception.  You can be sure I will be beating a path to his door along with fellow Midland foodies.

I confess I just returned from a shopping spree in the UK.  Wouldn’t go there just to shop but once over there the temptation to save tends to overpower patriotism. The spree included a vehicle from Van Monster – at about half the Irish price these guys are doing great trade over the water apparently, especially as their 6 month warranty applies in ireland and they will do the intra European VAT thing. It included filling the aforesaid van at Ikea (who have still to adjust their sterling prices) and Morrisons who have a great wine buyer at the moment – and then of course rather more clothes than anyone needs to buy in a week…

But meanwhile back in Ireland the first question of the New Year to the increasingly fascinating Enterprise Ireland forum sets the tone for the New Year – relating to an apparently genuine enquiry as to what gadgets people got for Christmas. This produced a riveting discussion on a failed two year old Sony Vaio and the perils of buying abroad. The theme is set folks!

I loved working on the Holiday World Show website. I trundled around with mountains of brochures in my car boot for weeks, hunting perfect photos for the banner changes. Like Bréifne these change randomly as a much more effective substitute for Flash. The curiosity factor appears to dramatically increases page views. With the shows happening in January and three week booking slot this was not one to miss the deadlines on and almost everyone had a hand in progress the week before Christmas.

Sandra Hennessy then spent all Christmas tweaking the AdWords – capitalising on the holiday search trends for this particular period each year is a fine art in itself. Once the shows are over the site then switches target completely to start the exhibitor booking process for 2010.

So if like me you simply don’t know where to go this year have a virtual browse and get along to Dublin RDS 23-25 January, Belfast Kings Hall 16-18 January to get the expert advice.

Moved to Days Inn Dublin this week – just worked out if I avoided three long car commutes I saved the planet and found the extra hours I needed to keep up. Plus taking the train gave me an extra hour on 3g which is not half bad on the Kildare to Heuston route. Did not however appreciate that the hotel was advertised as 3 star on late rooms and is pretty much unclassified. Tiny rooms but the great Days bed about which I have blogged before. But there is more than a subtle difference between a Days Inn and a Days Hotel! Why do so many hotels devalue branding like that? Hilton being the classic college case history.

Thursday night was my first ever attendance at the Golden Spiders as the guests of Hibernian Health Insurance – many thanks guys for the company on the table was just brilliant (and we give all staff their insurance as we think it is the best value out there and we need to keep ‘em well!) and I had the chance to meet Aodhan of Statcounter who is a personal hero (we have at least 500 clients on their free level of stats and although Google analytics have made some progress in our stable of sites I really do not think they need to have complete world dominance yet)

As for the Spiders. Well, was I alone in feeling the party spirit was a little strained? What with all the controversy on criteria and transparency for judging I just knew our shortlisted client PrivateSeller.ie had not a prayer – (not with a guy from Daft on the panel!). I liked that many of the winners were cited as having simple easy to use navigation and I loved it that Aodhan got an award.  But did I really need to be greeted by a bevy of blank faced bewigged blondes wearing skimpy elongated gold sequinned boob tubes pinned to black bras? It may be a male dominated event but frankly I thought that stopped back in the 70′s when every sales conference in my then employer started with girls in can-can gear.

On the other hand I was  really glad to make it to the Irish Internet Association AGM this year.  Fergal O’Byrne and his team have done a great job of turning round what used to be a real old boys club – and I was amazed to learn how cost effectively.  Involvement in crafting the standards for schemes like the Fáilte Ireland Web Check and Web Build (for which we are delighted to be suppliers) have boosted the credibility of the organisation big time.  Watch this space. Those guys are going places.

Next time you sit in an inevitable traffic queue through Abbeyleix on your way south, cast your eyes to the right and you will see something has changed in the local library. It has a big glass window.  Take time to pull over and explore further.  This is a library like no other library in Ireland.  The joinery is down to www.riversidefurniture.ie . One of the best we know, they also make fantastic kitchens like the one they just installed in what used to be the old SitesToGo Office featuring paintings from www.emmabarone.com – and reclaimed for cullinary purposes. Hard to imagine starting corporate life in this sleek (nearly finished!) kitchen. Nice to have it back though!

The second of the holiday blogs. Now flown to Antalya via Turkish Airlines who are like Aer Lingus a decade ago … homely flight attendants and unlimited small bottles of noxious wine, a free newspaper and squeaky leather seats. Another interesting booking process.  If I don’t do something on holiday I just sneak the laptop into the beachbag and make myself thoroughly unpopular. So as a rule it is walk, ski or ride. This was walk. No time to DIY and of course inside knowledge is key, maps are not a strong Turkish forte..

Googled walking holiday turkey  and took number one – most people do. Number 4 was old favourite Sherpa but we don’t do escorted (except in Moroccan Atlas where a mule is useful and they tend to come with a nice man..). Our eventual host was www.jonnyturk.com  who featured nowhere on Google as his adwords did not target Ireland. With a bit of work they could do better on search and keep the World Walks commission, they need:

• A generic domain name www.turkishwalkingholidays.com or www.turkeywalkingholidays.com both of which are surprisingly available 
• Dump frames construction
• Add proper meta content description and html page title to all pages
• Work on inbound links
• Submit a site map to google to demonstrate his rich content
• Sandra to double their click through rate on AdWords

But hey I am happy that they continue to focus on perfect service, driving us to the walk start – picking us up at the end, testing the new chef, introducing us to nice bars, frowning at my laptop when it appears at meal times…booking the hammam for the longest toughest 20km of my life… I can live with that. The rest you can read about on the Lycian  Way Blog…. when I get the confirmation of my admission to forum… eventually….

The road to hell is paved with good intentions but what geek blogs on holiday? Last week was spent in Istanbul enjoying the wedding of Karin (SitesToGo Holland) and Hakan – our favourite Joomla developer. The next will be walking stretches of the Lycian way. So  how to make an interesting internet point about this experience? Well, travel and tourism is one of the most mature Internet markets and second only to pornography in scale. So there should be a story here…

Choosing an Istanbul hotel was interesting (and actually very successful). First step Google ’boutique hotel Istanbul’ not really great as mostly returned consolidator agencies, not hotels own sites. Then tried a few in Trip Advisor . Gave offline travel agent Emer of McDermot travel a list – she came back with another list which I ignored for a few weeks. Then things got urgent so I went back to Trip Advisor and checked out her list – in the end booked Hotel Tashkonak through their own website.

You want to do Istanbul? Then this hotel is the greatest of the mid range boutique timber mansions for which the old city is rightly famous. Friendly is too small a word for the hospitality, but practical too – fellow guests walking through the old city early evening were tailed to the hotel by would be muggers but a sharp eyed shopkeeper tipped off the hotel and we were quite impressed by the security cameras fitted the following afternoon.  Three days is enough for Istanbul unless of course you have a wedding to go to…

Leaving Castlebar after a 3 hour speaking engagement at 11pm, and with a BNI meeting the following day in Tullamore at 7am, meant very little time for sleep. Even though home is just 40 minutes further down the road I decided to try an overnight in Days Hotel Tullamore with a short trip down the stairs to their excellent conference room in the morning. Normally I sleep badly in hotels so it a tough decision, but that extra hour sounded oh so appealing and the welcome at Days is always just great. What was really unexpected was the acres of really seriously comfy bed, effective soundproofing and blackout curtains. I slept better than I have in any hotel of any star rating around the world. Despite a post 1am hour on the room WiFi sorting crisis occurring in the opposite timezone. Apparently there is some kind of bed policy that means you can get this sort of sleep in any Days Hotel. Brilliant idea, after all what else are you paying for but a good nights sleep?

Funny they don’t really capitalise on this on the various admirably branded but rather predictable and staid Days’ websites – take a look at Trip Advisor to see how their clients spot the difference. How do modern hotels establish USPs in such a crowded marketplace where hotel websites seem increasingly to be cloned ? Fine if you are the Castle Hotel Group with all that Georgian interest, the Mills Inn with the craic factor or Castle Durrow as a gastronomic experience par excellence. But if you are an ordinary modern hotel with an extraordinarily good sleeping experience does the bog standard misty flash banner or splash page do you justice?

Ideas please!

Easter weekend was a great excuse for indulgence,, a couple of days walking the beach and over indulging in Clonakilty Quality Hotel started with a real boob. Searched for great rates on Last Minute.com put in ‘quality hotel clonakilty’ up came one decent offer – booked it to find on arrival they had served up and I (in post training fugue) had booked the Quality Hotel Cork! Having said that the Clonakilty guys were really helpful and a)found a room and b) sorted the transfer of the booking by the next day. Wake up Last Minute – precise searches should retrieve precise and honest results these days…. we are not always fully awake or proficient in using the web…

One night left en route back to Offaly and we consulted Hidden Ireland for a real treat. These guys spent a fair bit improving their site last year – we audited the old one and it was found wanting. However there was one big snag. Pages are not printable in ink saving mode. And largely unreadable. Its a no brainer guys – make at least the direction pages printable. And help save the planet’s ink. My Easter wish is that all these nice hotels would check their pages are printable and if they are not – tell their web designers it’s done with Style Sheets!!! Very easy but often overlooked

Mobarnane House was wonderful but rather exclusive – we were the only couple in residence and the Hidden Ireland thing is kind of about the other crackpots you meet over dinner. Take a few friends though and live like lords of the manor!

Now off to Hotel Reviews Ireland to plan the next one…

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