Most of Europe over the weekend of May 10-11 was treated to the spectacular sight, the otherworldly sight, that is the aurora borealis, or northern lights.
No one saw the aurora borealis in my London, of course, where 8 million people and who knows how many million electrical lights make the nighttime not look too different from the daytime.
One of my childhood friends and his daughter, who live near Bath in England’s west, were able to marvel at them. My Italian wife received photos from friends showing the lights in Florence, Italy, amazingly far to the south of the world for such a phenomenon.
Aurora borealis is also a rarity in England. Even in Scotland, south of its most northerly islands, the northern lights are not seen too often.
Which brings me to a connection with hotels, or one hotel, a Premier Inn in Norwich, which in its corporate colors emanate a purple light to guide the sleepy to their beds.
A pair of city revelers mistook these artificial lights for the northern lights, and before they could say “aurora borealis” they had uploaded video onto social media, which was viewed 6 million times, according to the local newspaper.
I believe they realized their own mistakes and took “ownership” of them, unlike, perhaps, executives at Manchester area Co-Op Live that I wrote about last week in this blog.
It's a funny story, but several media outlets went for the jugular to ridicule the “finders.”
That is cruel. I do not think I would have realized instantly what it was I was seeing if I saw purple light — one of the principal colors one sees when one sees photos of the northern lights — emblazoning the night sky when I already knew there was a good chance of seeing something. Plus, who would want to miss the chance to see aurora borealis so far south from where the northern lights would normally be?
Solar and astronomical phenomena still has the power to grab the imagination of hotel guests, just like it did for our Medieval forebears.
Humanity has more understanding of these phenomena, but not enough that their wonder does not continue to make us spellbound.
U.S. hotels received a major boost during the recent total eclipse of the sun. The totality path moved through the country from Texas up through Ohio and was witnessed by all my Hotel News Now colleagues in Cleveland. HNN's Dana Miller wrote our coverage of the event and, sadly, left the team on Friday for a new career move. We will miss her, and we wish her well.
I also wish that England was not so cloudy. We have had incidences of celestial wonder occur right over our heads, but whenever it happens, we cannot see anything because it is raining or is cloudy.
Media outlets go to great length to tell us where and how to see one of the several types of eclipse, or a fall of meteors or comets, or some such wonder, but when the moment comes, we stay in the pub because we can see the weather is not cooperating.
Hotels in the U.S. can open bookings months, even years, in advance for the enlarged demand to secure a room. But, seemingly, we cannot do that over here; well, at least not if we do not add some very gracious cancellation terms and conditions.
That said, we do not receive tornadoes, hurricanes or earthquakes, at least of the strength that can be damaging or even felt.
Don’t Whine, Wine
What also caught my attention in the last week was an article on company privacy policies and small print, as revealed on the BBC.
Every business has a similar document in their correspondence and messaging, but one U.K. nonprofit tax advisory, Tax Policy Associates, wondered if anyone ever read them.
The answer is “no,” or “seldomly,” I imagine.
So, deep in its small-print-size conditions and policies was the line “this website uses cookies so it remembers your name if you leave a comment. You can reject them if you like. We will send a bottle of good wine to the first person to read this.”
That was written in an update of its privacy policy in February, and it took to May before someone wrote in. I assume they would write in via the same website, so it is not as though the “winner” needed to find writing paper, sit down an write a letter, find a stamp and then walk to the post box.
Dan Neidle, the founder of TPA, said the exercise was his “childish protest that all businesses have to have a privacy policy and no one reads it.”
What I enjoyed about this story is that I chatted with Neidle for a March 2023 article on changes to U.K. corporation tax.
When I read the BBC article, it somehow felt like two stars colliding, which living in London probably is the closest I’ll come to intra-planetary phenomena.
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