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i-escape.com announces Alternative Hotel Awards winners 2008
Added: (Mon Feb 11 2008)
i-escape.com announces Alternative Hotel Awards winners 2008
Following the success of i-escape.com’s first Alternative Hotel Awards a year ago, they have come up with another hotlist, celebrating the most unusual experiences and hotel features unearthed by the website’s reviewers over the last year of worldwide explorations.
1. Best pillow menu – Evason Ana Mandara, Vietnam
You will find Evason Ana Mandara in Nha Trang on the beachfront, on the East coast of Vietnam. This super sexy hotel has no fewer than 16 types of pillows awaiting you, ranging from an isotonic heat-sensitive moulding pillow, traditional Vietnamese buckwheat-filled pillow to reduce snoring and headaches, a butterfly shape to stop your head rolling around, one to put between the knees to align your spine, and a boring old water-based pillow ... not to mention a choice of 6 topper pillows including a bergamot one (for relaxation), eucalyptus (for clearer breathing) and grapefruit which "clears the mind and reduces stress"!
Prices start from £135 for a garden room with twin or kingsize bed and breakfast
2. Best for would-be astronauts – Hotel Cocoon, Brazil
Hotel Cocoon in Salvador has just opened. The building itself is like a giant spaceship from a 1950's sci-fi film, the staff dress in citrus uniforms like cosmic Easyjet cabin staff, the pool changes colour every 5 seconds, and notices and menus are addressed to astronauts rather than guests. Ten out of ten for theming !
Prices start from £48 for a double, including breakfast and a welcome cocktail
3. Best for the stressed – Le Castel, France
Ex newspaper hack Jon and partner Nick love a dose of the bizarre. Inside their historic Normandy chateau, Le Castel, you'll find a shiny white grand piano perfect for Elton-style crooning, while outside a pair of llamas graze the immaculate lawns. Stressed out guests are invited to take these placid beasts for a stroll around the grounds or into the village of Montpinchon. Doctors say it's the ultimate in pet therapy! We dare you to pop into the tabac and ask for "un café au lait et 20 Gitanes pour la llama, s'il vous plait!"
Prices start from £100 for double room and breakfast per night
4. Best for loners – The One Hotel Angkor, Cambodia
At the aptly named The One Hotel in Siem Reap, Cambodia, you won't be queuing to check in, or moaning about noisy neighbours: you're the only guest! Owner Martin Dishman offers just the one double room, but it's a real beauty. The One Hotel is in the heart of the old town, with a designer lounge that opens onto a narrow passageway and a shaded roof terrace where you can loll about on a comfy daybed or slip into a hot tub and gaze up at the blue sky.
Priced from £126 for the kingsize room per night
5. Best for your inner children – Art Hotel Luise, Berlin
If the big bad world is all too much for you, book room 107 (Mammelstraum) at the Art Hotel Luise in Berlin: the bed is 50% oversized in every dimension, so climbing into it and snuggling under the vast duvet makes you feel like a little child again. To leave the real world even further behind, ask for room 309, where a sloping bed suspended on chains, along with two aircraft seats and a log book on the fold-out table, gives the impression of flying through the skies in a plane.
Prices for rooms all vary but start from around £58 per night for a double
6. Best for trainlovers – Villa Creta, Crete
Take the train... to dinner! At Villa Creta on the Greek island of Crete, the owners have installed a toy ‘choo choo’ train to shuttle between the two family-sized villas and their own home, where they cook dinner for guests. If you prefer a bumpier ride, you can borrow one of their horses (it's a working farm) or ride a mountain bike to the top of rocky Mt Yiouhtas, sacred to Zeus
Prices for Villa Despina start from £156 per night, and it sleeps up to five
7. Best for carnivores – Lion Sands Lodge, South Africa
Lion Sands River Lodge dinner menu includes some unusual meats: crocodile kebabs in lemon butter and apricot sauce, or blesbok fillet stuffed with peanut butter and coriander. You can also start the day with a cooked breakfast which offers a choice of five different sausages, including gemsbok or warthog meat! Tried all that? What about Eland Bobotie (this is not the name of the chef: eland is a large antelope, bobotie is a spiced minced meat dish).
Prices start from £245 per person per night and include two game drives, all meals and airport transfers from Shukuza, plus as many sausages as you like for breakfast!
8. Best bathtub – Fumba Beach Lodge, Zanzibar
There are some strong contenders here, with Heritage Suites in Cambodia and bb22 in Sicily topping the list of egg-shaped in-room tubs, while Periscope in Athens deserves an honourable mention for the rooftop Jacuzzi in its Penthouse Suite as well as Holm House in Wales for its shiny bronze monster of a tub in the "Flatholm" room. But the prize must go to Fumba Beach Lodge in Zanzibar, whose Baobab Suite has a treetop Jacuzzi, the perfect place for sociable sundowners after a day of strenuous snorkelling and sunbathing.
Prices for the Baobab Suite start from £83 per night for half board
9. Most appropriately named staff member – Sanbona Wildlife Reserve, South Africa
At Sanbona Wildlife Reserve in the South African Karoo, the Wildlife Manager is called Ryno Erasmus - there is no better name, surely, for a scholar of our big unicorned friend. Priceless!
Prices start from £230 per person, which includes full board and all game drives and nature walks
10. Only hotel in the world on its own time zone – literally! Six Senses Hideaway, Vietnam
Six Senses Hideaway sets all the clocks in the hotel one hour ahead of the rest of Vietnam and urges guests to do the same with their watches. The reason? To encourage visitors to get up in time to catch the stunning sunrise over the 2km crescent beach where the resort is set.
Doubles start from £372 per night
...And lastly, a special prize for a hotel which didn’t make the grade with the i-escape reviewers...
11. Best for car spotters (hotel rejected): Casas Cuevas de Pedro Alarcon, Spain
We arrived at the Casas Cuevas de Pedro Alarcon near Granada expecting rustic seclusion. Instead we found a 4-lane highway roaring past the prison-like perimeter fence; and in our roadside cave-room (for that's what they are), burrowed under the asphalt, we had the alarming sensation of a stream of juggernauts rumbling quite literally over our head as we slept (or not).
When we emerged bleary-eyed and blurry-brained, and asked to speak to the said Pedro Alarcon, we were told it was "not possible". Only later did we discover that he's been dead 100 years – he's not the hotelier but a 19th-century author!
For further media information as well as high quality images please contact Fiona Reece at Fiona Reece Public Relations, fiona@fionareece.com, 0117 330 7282 or 07702 684 682