It’s been a good day!

Today has been a busy day on the Motel front with a wide range of good news rolling in…..

Lonely Planet has released its new, post-quake Christchurch & Canterbury chapter from the upcoming Lonely Planet New Zealand guide,
 

We are there on Page 12 between the Jailhouse and The George.  Look at that! 3 top accommodation providers from different genres all together - ranging from $30 to $886!! Jailhouse – Top Backpacker, CentrePoint on Colombo – Top Motel, The George – Top Hotel!  Will also mention Orari B&B – Top B&B just to our left!! 
We congratulate Lonely Planet on producing a comprehensive guide to post quake Christchurch that can easily be said to be the best guide to our new city at time of printing!!  Most noticeable is that they have shown the central city area is alive and well and very much a place to visit!!
We are proud to be recognised in this way by one of the world’s top travel magazines and look forward to welcoming LP users to Christchurch!

A recent traveller, (Trip Advisor name; OmNomNomDePlume) who found us on twitter and drove in with ½ the South Island on his car reviewed us on Trip Advisor in probably one of the longest reviews we’ve ever had!!  It kinda summed up a lot of what we do and recognised the effort we put into helping the travelling public get the most out of their visit to Christchurch.  Made us laugh and smile! Have a read….here

Received the latest update for our all new motel website that we are working on.  Starting to come on nicely and that gave us an extra little buzz!!  Sorry but it’s all under wraps till we can get it together……..stay tuned.

Gotta live the good times and we did indeed today!!

CentrePoint on Colombo via Smartphone …… thanks to Motella

While we always pride ourselves on being on the cutting edge, ahead of every aftershock, first inline for the portaloo and on the right side of the cordon when it comes to motel related social media developments, we are also prepared to give credit when it is due.  

Admittedly the only reason this happened was because we were delayed by dodging the liquefaction, bumping over molehills and avoiding central city roadblocks while out buying Easter eggs for our guests. 

But being first is being first and we congratulate Motella for “having their geeks beaver away in the basement ofMotella HQ on the new mobile blog template while most of NZ was relaxing athome away from work and the nation's retail stores this Easter.”

So, between filing our EQC insurance claims, guessing the strength of the latest aftershock and urging people to be careful of splashback when emptying their chemical toilets, we put our thinking hats on and arranged for our hackers to break into the basement of Motella HQ and steal the access codes to the new, fantastic, mobile blog template.  

So now we can also beat our chests!  The next time you are out-and-about visit CentrePoint on Colombo Motel on your smartphone you will be able to view our blog in a smart new mobile format that's easier to read, navigate, make comments and watch videos on the go.

And if you have any time left after adding to your life by viewing our blog, have a look at Motella’s blog too!  It’s almost as good as ours!

A Sign of the Shitty Times We Live In!

(This blog comes with a bad language/bad taste/terrible smell advisory)

This is no reflection on the state of the motel industry but there’s some SSMC (shitty social media communication) going on between the 2 isles of Godzone!  Here’s what its all about!

Some may find some parts of this blog disgusting, downright rude, smelly and in bad taste.  If you are one of those to react in such a way, click on the little white cross in the red box in the top right hand corner of the screen now.  In reality, we in Christchurch have become very used to talking to each other about our pooze and weeze and how we deal with these everyday, so for once you can hear about it as well.

Why is that? It’s because the eastern side of the city no longer has a working sewer system.  Some people can still flush their loos but they are being asked not to.  In place there are 27,500 chemical toilets, 400 chemical disposal tanks and more than 2,000 portaloos. 

 (Many thanks to Bebe Thompson for sharing the family's toilet secrets)

When you feel the urge, you either go to the Portaloo on the street corner or, when your chemical toilet is full, you carry your tank of pooze and weeze to the disposal tank (if you’re lucky, its on your street) and empty it in full view of the entire neighbourhood.  Little old ladies and short people have to make the trip twice as many times as others because of the difficulty of carrying & lifting a full tank up to empty it. Splashback is a constant worry for all.  The council has been encouraging neighbours to make the chore communal – “let me help you empty your chemical toilet tank!”  Citizens also have to hope their toilet room is big enough to fit an extra loo in it!  Yes, the logistics of taking a crap are somewhat more intense than before.

Now, back to the story.  Just as we felt that Christchurch was ready to take another step forward, we woke up to a newspaper headline screaming the horrific fact that there was a 50/50 chance our sewerage system would collapse and the whole city would be enveloped in a poo infused odour.

Just to gross you out totally, currently 40 million litres of sewage (1/4 of the daily total) is leaking out of broken pipes.  Just because we can flush our loos doesn’t mean it goes to the proper place!  You may ask, where is it going? The answer is no-one knows because the damage is so widespread. Ooooh yuckie!

Apparently the only way to solve the problem is to conserve water – have shorter showers, don’t have baths etc.  Unfortunately there is nothing we can do about the intestinal flow which results in either No. 1 or No.2 so we encourage the theory of only flush when it’s brown!

Which brings us to today’s topic.  Despite the possible impending disaster, there is little visible panic and outside of the article in today’s paper there does not appear to be an overwhelming push to get the word out – not everyone reads the paper after all and there is not any great radio blitz to stop us pooing & peeing.  But we decided it was time to put our best foot forward.  While us stoic Christchurch people are totally at ease talking about ablutions, we realise that others from outside the city may not be so ready.  We decided to take the extraordinary step of placing a laminated notice in each guest room asking guests to flush as little as possible.  This alleviates the need to ask guests not to flush their toilets after asking whether they want green or blue milk.

In reality, we do believe that most people in this world do actually know how to live and that the last thing they want to do is spend their holidays reading signs about how they should be spending their holidays.

But, because I prefer smelling fresh air instead of what my bathroom can smell like, we took the plunge, stuck the laminated notice on with Bluetac and tweeted the result.  We directed the tweet towards @Motella – the ultimate lover of motel room signage!

I sat waiting for a jovial 140 character limit reply but was disappointed.  Oh well, I thought, maybe Gisborne motels are really busy with all the people not coming to Christchurch now.  It was not till later that we noticed a facebook posting mentioning a blog entitled – Motel Sign Of The Times.

We are proud to have once again been judged worthy of a mention in the world famous Motella Blog, just as we are happy to be able to share the pain Christchurch is feeling with those who can comfortably sit on their own throne and dispose of their business with the simple push of a button. Shit you guys are lucky!

We hope you all think of this blog next time you are doing what ½ of Christchurch’s population now finds to be a most challenging task.  And we hope that as a result of a bit of banter between two motel social media participants – this story reaches a lot further than the stench will if our sewerage system does totally fail…..

Postscript: CentrePoint on Colombo Motel's toilets are flushable.

CentrePoint on Colombo honoured in the 2011 Trip Advisor Travellers’ Choice Awards – Part 2

We have already blogged about winning this award, but now there’s more!  It would be nice to be able to write about something other than a bloody earthquake, but it just about impossible and today is no exception.

Since 25 Aug 2009 we have been ranked either 1 or 2 on Trip Advisor in Christchurch.  If you want to know why just read the 244 reviews we have.  In short we do it by keeping our motel in tip top shape, offering bloody good service, having friendly personalities and being close to the best of Christchurch.

Our efforts were rewarded and we were honoured this year to win the Trip Advisor Travellers’ Choice Awards.  And we have now received the plaque and room cards to go with the award!  Only problem is that there was a bloody great earthquake in the middle that has changed everything.

The future is uncertain in our present position, we are still only a short walk to town, but town is not there and won’t be for quite some time!  We are also limited in restaurant choices.  Sometimes we think we may as well be on Mars.

 
But this is life in post quake Christchurch so we’ll just go on as a motel in tip top shape, offering bloody good service with friendly personalities ……close to the Red Zone.

Social Media at CentrePntMotel

We’ve been in here at CentrePoint on Colombo Motel for 3 years, 1 month and 6 days and considering the events of recent days we may well be here for quite a while longer. Anyone want a motel? #justjoking

When we took over this place, the office computer was not even connected to the internet and online bookings were a “We’ll get back to within 24 hrs.” Mmmmm….gotta do something here! Is what we thought!

Just to put the record straight, Naomi is the tech in the family and started blogging a couple of years before we left Japan in anticipation of the future, making this about our 5^th year of Social Media mucking in.  Jeff adds his sometimes unique view on life.

Front office social media HQ

Back office social media HQ

So what do we do? We blog in Japanese and English, we have 3 Facebook accounts, we’re on Twitter, we actively participate in Trip Advisor and have a great cms system that lets us tweak our website when we feel the urge! Woot!

Why do we do it….to sell rooms of course!  C’mon, this is a capitalistic endeavour!  Have we sold any? You may ask. Yuss! We can answer, we have, ask the next Bandicoot you meet about it!

But we also do it cos it’s a lot of fun and a good learning curve that is ever evolving.  As the saying goes…it’s fun to live on the edge!

Our exploits on social media do lead to connections on social media but also other media as well.  Recently Jeff has been interviewed on @NewstalkZB by @susimaclean about social media’s roll in the 4 Sep. quake and next was an article in the Christchurch Press about Jeff’s morning pic tweets of the Cathedral, before and after 222.

But it also leads to a bit of stress, some obviously don’t approve of some of the things we do and some obviously don’t approve of the way we say things and this makes us feel like the nail that sticks out a bit sometimes.   But we cope with it, we cope with it.

And today we got the Crem de la creme…..Motella wrote a blog about us….Awwww shucks……nice warm fuzzy feeling! Thanks Stu!

When Tweople get twogether

Today a bunch of people, most of them Tweople got together and did a number of amazing things.


Best of all, we gave #eqnz a big kick in the goolies, but we also helped out some people who have been kicked in the goolies by #eqnz. Give and take?

Missing Link is a business here in the Christchurch CBD in a beautiful heritage(?) building that survived the Sept. 4 quake but was red carded (means need to be fixed before people can use again) after the Boxing Day quake.

 The powers at be decided that while it was red carded, Missing Link was able to have a limited amount of time to get things removed as long as a structural engineer was present. #eqnz wasn’t gonna stop us!

So Twitter came to the fore and the word went out resulting in about 40 people, employees and Tweople etc. getting together to clean out the office in 55 minutes.

Don’t know about the others, but mr15 and myself responded to the twitter request to help some people in need, and as a way of saying Sod Off!! to #eqnz. We have been relatively lucky in this disaster and so its noice to be able to help those that have had a bit more shaken out of them than we have.

A lot of people wonder just what social media can do but this little effort today shows that something good can come from a bunch of people tapping away with a limit of 140 characters!


Footnote: Tweople are people who tweet. A lot of twitter words start with Tw, for example, twogether. #eqnz is a twitter hashtag which refers to the 4 Sep. earthquake. Goolies are goolies.


Follow @Centrepntmotel on twitter and enrich your life!?