Seacoast History Blog # 106
February 21, 2011  

I visited London a number of times in the early 1970s. I went back for a week in the 1990s, but that was before the Internet kicked in. Now I’m returning for a week and what a difference. For the last few days I’ve been walking the streets of London, virtually, using Google Streetview. It’s almost scary. After nailing down a place to stay, I was able to walk the neighborhood from my snow-covered New Hampshire office. I know where the grocery stores are near the rented apartment. I’ve located the local pubs and have been checking their Web site menus online. I strolled around the banking district (the rental is near the Tower of London) and visited the site of Samuel Pepys house that burned on Seething Lane in the Great Fire of the late 1600s. I looked at photos of his statue in the park there and read related bits from his diary. It’s freaky. But that’s not the point of this blog. (Continued below)

What fascinates me is how much harder it is to book a room in London now that we have all this technology at hand. In the olden days (before the mid 1990s) the potential tourist simply looked at a few brochures, talked to a few friends, and threw a dart at the wall. You lucked out or the place sucked. In London, it was usually the latter. The city is filled with beds for rent. There must be a million of them, and most have saggy mattresses. The rooms are the size of a closet and smell like one too. The streets are noisy. The service is lousy. You only get a couple of TV channels. The bathroom is down the hall and you’re sharing it with five portly people from Germany.  

I knew all that going in to this latest search. But the Web has changed things. Why, I figured, settle for a crappy room in the Information Age?  Sites like TripAdvisor.com can point the buyer to a massive list of potential hotels, B&Bs, and rental apartments. The modern traveler can see photos of each room, compare prices and amenities, check availability, click to a street map, and book a room instantly online.  

Whatever the travel agents used to do is in our hands now. No added fees. But no one to blame. Pick a noisy hotel with bad service and a lumpy bed – and it’s your own fault.  

Three days into the vetting process I was beginning to wish it was the 70s again. I was bleary-eyed from reading hundreds of consumer reviews. For every guest that got cold water and a broken shower, another guest had the best time of her life. Like movies on Netflix, the ratings tended to hover in the middle – between 2.8 and 3.2 stars out of five. Whenever I found a highly rated hotel, it was gone minutes later. Makes sense. People across the planet are all looking at the same Web page at the same time.  

When my wife and I finally picked the perfect spot, we hammered in a credit card number. But somewhere between New Hampshire, the credit card company in New York, the travel Web site in Australia, and the apartment in London – the electronic pipeline jammed and the credit card failed. By the time we sorted it out, the seven discounted rooms were gone. 

By the fourth day we were getting punch drunk from the overload of details. We argued over which had the worst bathroom (in London they leave the toilet seat up in the photo). We could zoom-in on the furniture, check the utensils in the kitchenette, and review the menus in the restaurants across the street. We were getting emails from rental agents in London who wrote when we slept and slept when we wrote back. By the time we saw their new recommendations, the rental was gone. Hotels with 800 rooms were booked –up like Bethlehem.  

So I started to widen the perimeter, searching for rentals on the edge of London. We pushed up our budgeted rate and lowered our expectations. I began calculating the exact number of minutes it would take to get to the British Museum and the Globe Theatre from Underground tube stops all over the city. My brain was filled with more trivia than Watson the Jeopardy-playing computer.  

In the end, after almost 20 hours online, we were ready to throw a dart and take our chances. That’s when the phone rang. A guy who knew a guy referred a place owned by an American. He had good references. We had good references. The price was right and the location was ideal. We wired the money like they did in the days of the pony express.  

It could turn out to be a bomb. We’ll see. But we definitely need a vacation after all this planning.  

Copyright © 2011 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.

A READER RESPONDS:
I remember when computer technology started edging its way into our office and homes. Pundits were telling us how much more we'd be able to get done in far less time, and the stock prices of leisure product companies started to soar. Well, that's not exactly the way things worked out, is it? Now one person does the work of four, and we spend all our time at home Googling, internet surfing, on Facebook, or trying to book a room in London. My wife is convinced that technology is a terrorist plot to reduce our productivity because we spend an inordinate amount of time with our IT consultants trying to resolve many and varied hardware and software problems instead of doing something productive. Ain't technology wonderful? I think I'll go curl up with my iPad...  -- Jay Diener

Please visit these SeacoastNH.com ad partners.