't Wapen van Marion

I decided to try out Lufthansa airline on this business trip to Rotterdam since they are part of the Star Alliance member. I didn’t really have too many choices if I were to consolidate as much travel as I can with only one frequent flyer program rather than scatter around in all three. The only direct flight from LAX to Amsterdam is by KLM, part of Sky Team, which I don’t participate much since Continental left the program to join up with Star Alliance. The US based airlines all make connections somewhere in the east coast. This means the 11+ hours flight time gets cut in two segments, most likely not able to have a decent sleep after serving you dinner. The European base airlines make connections in Europe; therefore allowing the passenger a longer leg.

Anyway, the seat was ok; it was not a flat bed. The food was ok; I had better meal on another airliner before. The entertainment sucks, so I read and slept. When I was bored, I took pictures of the food.

The Lufthansa lounge in Frankfurt was a bit disappointing. I have high expectation for non-US based lounge. They don’t even have free internet access, what, no internet for business traveler???? The airport is just about as old as LAX, at least, it is smoke free to some extend. I saw these glass cubicles full of smokers, yuck….



As for hotel, the refinery is located in Europoort, about 20 minutes drive from Rotterdam. This means we either deal with the traffic jam each morning and evening if we stay in Rotterdam and commute out. Or, we stay somewhere local. This time, we opted to try out 't Wapen van Marion. The hotel is supposed to be located near a canal beach; with unique dunes and beautiful nature.

But as usual around this time of the year in Amsterdam, it was rainy. And who would want to venture out in midst of rain and cold …. Not me anymore….so I didn’t see the beach, nor the dunes. The only thing I saw was the hotel!!!

The lobby and the dining area were nice. It gave me hopes. But then the room was very basic. One of the things my American colleague and I couldn’t stand is the lack of lighting. Everything seems very dim. I like bright room when I am on business. I normally do a bit of reading in bed before falling to sleep. But when I travel oversea, I miss this because the low voltage lighting makes it too dark to read and the TV has very limited English speaking shows. The only thing I can do is surf the internet. And you can’t even watch American TV shows on the internet because of international licensing issue. People said I could do so if I used an American proxy server. Well, I tried and still don’t seem to work.



See, business travel is just so over rated!!!