HotelChatter asks the question of whether or not you’d want to stay on a women-only floor (for the women among us, of course. Sorry guys.). It’s riffing off this Vancouver Sun article about how more hotels are catering to women, and how they’re doing it.

I don’t think I’d care too much one way or another about the single-gender floor, though I might feel a bit safer if I had to walk the halls late at night. It could be a bit tricky though. The article says that Canada has privacy laws that prohibit the hotel from asking a guest’s gender when s/he makes the reservation, so you might have to guess (apologies in advance to all named Kim, Chris, and other non-denominational monikers). Or maybe you have to request the women’s-only floor? Then you get into transgender issues, etc. I wouldn’t go there unless I had some solid research pointing me toward it.

But more generally, do men and women really want different things from their hotel experience? As the article quotes Penelope Trunk, CEO of the Brazen Careerist, a social network site for Gen Y professionals: “Men want their room to be a something where they dump their stuff; they go out drinking, they come back and watch porn,” says Trunk. “The women want it to be a spa.”

Hmm, not much of a spa-lady here, and I don’t want to buy into the drinking/porn male stereotype. But I do agree with the article’s contention that women eat room service more (note to chefs: please have more than one veggie entree option for we veg-heads who end up eating in more than one night), use the treadmills more than the weight machines, and care more deeply about bathroom lighting and amenities than most guys do. But generally, all I care about is that it’s safe, clean, has lights I can figure out how to turn on, a coffee pot with coffee for the morning, great service, and a comfy bed. The rest is just fluff — nice fluff, for sure, but still fluff.

What do you think?

A decade or so ago, an unemployed 30-something screenwriter named Bill Geerhart thought he’d have some fun by posing as a 10-year-old named Billy who had lots of questions he wanted to ask of famous and infamous people, from serial killers to celebrity lawyers. He actually got replies to his letters, which he collected and just now published as a book called Little Billy’s Letters: An Incorrigible Inner Child’s Correspondence with the Famous, Infamous, and Just Plain Bewildered.

BoingBoing got permission to run some of them, and they are just priceless. My favorites are from the National Hobo Association and the CEO of Caesars Palace, who basically says gambling is a losing proposition, if fun to do.

Thanks to the incomparable Patti Digh at 37 Days for the pointer.

Holding meetings outside the U.S. has its own challenges — so many that we have a whole special supplement and section on our Web site to help planners navigate their way. But how much thought has gone into accommodating differences in webinars and other types of virtual events that attract an international audience? That’s what webinar expert Ken Molay tackles in this post: Don’t Give Green Hats In China (and yes, he does tell you why green hats aren’t a good thing in China, which is good because I was wicked curious).

Update: Check out David Patt’s post on other types of cultural differences — very interesting points.

Frankly, Blunch doesn’t come close to it for me (that would be Barf Bed and Breakfast, though maybe a B&B doesn’t count as a restaurant?), but check out this post about bad restaurant names on Serious Eats. There are some doozies in the comments, but it could put you off your feed if you peruse it over lunch.

Thanks to Patti Shock for the pointer!

While the rise of social media also gave rise to the level of trust we put in the great unwashed (aka, friends, peers, and other people just like us), that now seems to be leveling off, according to this LA Times article. It looks at the Edelman Trust Barometer’s latest findings:

According to the survey, since 2008 the number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of consumer and business information dropped by almost half, from 45% to 25%. Similarly, in the past year, the number of people who view peers as credible spokespersons also slipped. Even more strikingly, however, after a precipitous decline earlier in the decade, informed consumers have regained trust in traditional authorities and experts.

Blame the increasing professionalization of social networking sites as companies have climbed on board, and way too much irrelevant noise from just about everyone (myself included — sorry!). Also from the article:

After indulging the thoughts and opinions of anyone who was “just like me,” it seems that people are now looking for a firmer guarantee of clarity, objectivity and accuracy.

I’d like to add to the mix that social media has also spawned a whole new crop of experts who have risen above the “just like me” level while still feeling more like a friend and peer than an aloof expert (think Jeff Hurt, for just one of many in this business).

Does this mean that people now will translate this to the face-to-face environment, with participants wanting fewer peer-to-peer sessions, unconferences, and roundtables and more expert-delivered lectures? Geez, I hope not, but it does make me wonder. (Thanks to Lisa for the pointer!)

While outboarding — renting a hotel suite and wooing customers at a trade show without actually supporting the show itself — is nothing new, the recent Consumer Electronics Show’s problems with it have caught the attention of the New York Times In fact IAEE released a statement condemning the practice four years ago.

What does seem to be new, at least to me, is that hotels at CES seemed to be taking the initiative to give the boot to convention crashers. Is that putting too much of a burden on the hotel? I tend to agree with the hospitality lawyer the article quotes and say it is, especially in this economy, a bit much to ask hotels to be the exhibit police, though I applaud those that are willing and able to do it.

I can’t imagine this problem is going to ever go away entirely, but it is interesting to see a major newspaper covering it.

Update: If you ever have doubts about the importance of fact checking, there’s a doozy in the article that someone just pointed out to me: The article says CES drew 1.4 million attendees, down from 1.7 million. Needless to say, those numbers actually refer to the show’s square footage. Oops.

Update: I should have known this was too juicy to be true. Here’s the real scoop from the TSA blog. Thanks, Jim, for the update.

If you’re Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, you sign autographs on them. At least that’s what happened when he found people holding copies of the scans of his body taken with one of the new full-body scanners at London’s Heathrow, according to Yahoo India News. From the article:

Khan said he did not know that the body-scans - installed in the wake of last year’s abortive Christmas Day bombing of a transatlantic flight over Detroit - showed up every little detail of one’s body…

‘Then I saw these girls - they had these printouts. I looked at them. I thought they were some forms you had to fill. I said ‘give them to me’ - and you could see everything inside. So I autographed them for them.’

He’s a way better sport than I would have been.

Click on the photo to enlarge it, then tell me — is this not the best airplane paint job ever? It’s brought to you by Kulula, South Africa’s low-cost airline. (Thanks to Chris Rawlinson!)

Some headlines that caught my eye this morning:

IATA: Airline industry will take at least 3 years to recover

Canada eases carry-on restrictions

Air France may give obese passengers a break

And last, but certainly not least: London’s newest tourist attraction - ABBAWORLD

When I read this article in today’s Boston Globe, I couldn’t help but wonder if this may in fact be where associations are — or perhaps should be? — headed: The End of the Office and the Future of Work. The basic premise is that we’re moving away from the old business model (you get a job and work for a company that provides salary, benefits, etc.) and into one where jobs are chopped into pieces and fed to a growing army of freelancers. It’s fascinating stuff. But when you lose the old employment model, you also lose the security, the bennies, and the sense of belonging to a community of sorts. From the article:

But to provide a greater level of stability freelance workers may require a new kind of institutional ally. Malone predicts that the growth in freelance work will necessitate a different breed of labor union to provide some of the benefits the employer now offers. Today’s unions are largely defined by their role in collective bargaining - negotiating with employers for better benefits, conditions, and pay. But many early unions actually arose in industries like construction or the garment trade where workers didn’t work for the same employer for very long, so the longstanding relationship wasn’t with the employer but the union.

These unions were more like guilds: organizations, united by a common set of specialized work skills, that combined elements of a social club and a mutual aid society. And rather than pressuring employers to provide benefits, they provided them directly. Malone argues that this sort of guild would be well-suited to a work landscape in which more workers are freelance. Such organizations might even see fit to offer income-smoothing insurance policies where freelancers can in good times pay into a fund that then helps them through leaner periods.

This sounds like a good fit for the association world to me. Of course, they’ll also be in the business of meetings. Freelancing can be tough on a lot of people due to the isolation of working remotely, or mostly solo, or both, so companies using freelancers, associations, and/or guilds will also likely include community-builders and ways for people to connect (i.e., meetings). More from the article:

Some of the online freelance companies try to tackle this. Most have online forums through which they try to recreate some of the dynamics of an actual workplace. iStockphoto goes further, organizing “iStockalypses” for select groups of its photographers: weeklong gatherings in exotic locales worldwide that are part party and part photo shoot. And iStockphoto photographers have begun organizing regional “Minilypses” on their own as a way to pool resources for photo shoots, to share information and simply to socialize.

Freelancers Union’s attempts to knit its members together socially are more conventional. Last month the organization held a holiday party in New York, and 150 or so people showed up. It was, says Horowitz, an enthusiastic crowd. “These people hadn’t been to a holiday party because they had been freelancing for years,” says Horowitz. “They want to feel connected, they want to feel that they’re part of something.”

At least that isn’t likely to change.

Update: A colleague just reminded me that we covered a similar idea in an article a few years ago, albeit from a more generational perspective: Associations Take Aim at Generation X. A key quote:

In the current service-driven economy, where workers are less likely to band together in the form of labor unions, “we’re going to find that associations are going to be a more common type of social capital building and a pretty indispensable resource for professionals,” [Arthur Brooks, PhD, associate professor of public administration and director of the Nonprofit Studies Program at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University] contends. “People might be hungry for a different source of community.”

He believes that associations are representative of the new “idea” economy. “We’re talking about the golden years of workplace-based social capital with associations smack in the middle of it.”