My husband and I are sheltering in place like many of you. Also like many of you, we don’t go out much. We go to the grocery store and for walks, but that’s about it. Now, that some family members are getting vaccinated, we can visit them. However, we did take a short field trip to Orlando, Florida recently. I had a gift certificate for a hotel stay that I won as a door prize at a meeting over a year ago. Due to the pandemic, I haven’t been able to use it. I called the hotel and they were gracious. They said to ignore the expiration date on the certificate and to come on down! We did.
We spent two nights doing the same thing in a different environment. We walked, worked on our computers and hung out. It was still a nice little diversion. It was not our usual hotel chain, so it was a new experience. I learned several things.
- I learned that many people are traveling again. We were very surprised at just how busy the hotel was. In fact, we looked down into the pool from our 10th floor room and said, “Gosh, can you imagine what this place must look like in the height of the season?” Most of the guests seemed to be speaking English, so they were not foreign tourists. Eventually, we figured out that Americans take the idea of Spring Break very seriously and they refuse to be denied. . . even for a global pandemic. We had to wait for an available elevator more than once. On the positive side, the vast majority of people were very respectful about wearing a mask while in the hotel’s common areas.
2. I learned about clean seals. This hotel brand put a two-part navy sticker on every hotel room door after it has been cleaned. The first part of the sticker goes on your door. The second part of the sticker goes on the door jamb. They are connected by a little perforated piece. If the two halves are still connected, you are good to go! If the perforation is broken, that is supposed to signal that someone accessed the room since the cleaning crew sanitized it last. It was a nice visual and I am sure it makes some guests feel safer. But, personally, I walked into the room, and immediately took out cleansing wipes and wiped down every surface myself. Afterall, I know that some cleaning crews do a better job than others.
3. I learned this property had beautiful event space. As a professional event planner for nearly two decades, I pay attention to these things. So, this part of the post is for my event planning colleagues out there. There appear to be at least a dozen breakout rooms and a huge ballroom too. Yes, the ballrooms has big columns that would need to be worked around, but there is a nice neutral gray and beige color scheme. The ballroom actually has windows! Natural light can be a rare thing in a hotel conference space, so that’s a plus. If you are an event planner and would like to know which property this is, just drop me a note in the comments section below.
Overall, it was a successful field trip, even if it was just an extension of what we’ve been doing at home. Mr. HomeFree has been ordered back on the road. So, our real travel adventures resume shortly. In the meantime, we had a nice sojourn to a familiar city. Next stop: Alabama!
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