HotelReservations.com offers all you need to plan your vacation from the comfort of your home: hotels, motels, resorts, flights, cars, vacation rentals and vacation packages. This one website is all you need to have a complete trip plan.

Services are currently offered for more than 70,000 properties worldwide - hotels, Bed and Breakfast, condominiums and all inclusive resorts in many countries, including top holiday destinations in the United States, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

Appropriately, the site is browsable in several languages and currencies, including Britain. Canadian, Spanish, French, German and Italian.

I tried several of the features at Hotel Reservations dot com and here’s a summary of some that I liked.

For the hotel reservation feature, they have a feature to enable you to list hotels located near famous landmarks. For example, for the city of London I could pick the hotel of my choice located near Harrods. The hotel compare function allows you to shortlist hotels to assist you in making up you mind.

They even have a comprehensive destination guide that enables you to find out details about your destination and hence plan you trip in advance. It contains recommendations on attractions, restaurants, hotels, even up-to-date weather forecasts, health tips and much more for thousands of destinations, even those not listed in the 15 countries!

For those seeking special-interest holidays, the site offers options as wide ranging as family-oriented, beach hotels, gambling, golf and spa holidays.

US customers are offered road trips, where you can find a destination by specifying driving time from your current location. Indeed this is a great idea for a great weekend trip on wheels!

The prices offered are competitive with prevailing market rates, with big discounts offered on world wide destinations.

Of course, if you are more comfortable talking with a human, you can always call their toll-free number at 1-800-447-4136.

This Hicom lorry is much newer than my car - yet my car’s door handles are in much better condition.

So either the guy is too violent, or the vehicle quality leaves much to be desired.

Holiday Hypermarket is a travel agency based in the Britain, and it is one of the largest of its kind in Europe.

And now it has gone online.

Through its website, you can get literally millions of package holiday bargains, last minute deals, cheap flights and all inclusive holidays to destinations all over the world.

For example, should you check out the flights to Kefalonia on their website, you’d be shown bargains on offer at the top of the screen, which you can grab immediately. Further down is a quick description of the place. But what really caught my attention is what’s displayed below the holiday videos at Kefalonia posted by users. In striving to show what the place really looks and feels like, that sure beats mere text and pictures!

The bottom of the screen is embedded with Google Maps and Google Earth, so that you can check out Kefalonia from above.

Those are great features to help you to prepare for that holiday you’ve been looking forward to.

Photo taken by yours truly, somewhere in Lintas, Kota Kinabalu on 29th September 2007.

At first I was taken aback, a little fact finding revealed that the guy (visible on the top left) is a professional, he’s been doing this for years.

Our garage can fit 8 cars. But before you rise an eyebrow or two, consider the fact that our house is has legs, and not all the cars belong to me.

There are quite a few things there that would be nice to put behind some nice cabinet doors. Currently they are in a store room but that isn’t what I call properly organised. Everything is everywhere, and almost anything imaginable: Welding equipment, car tyres, brooms, shovels, pots, hoes, spades.

Hence, installing garage cabinets downstairs would be nice.

MCs and Floor Managers on the left of stage: on the left is Disney

As I mentioned previously, during our state-level charity dinner on 22nd October, I have never had the experience of getting an Akademi Fantasia artiste to perform at a function I was involved in organising. Stark details of the contract are of course P & C, but I hope by sharing some of the points here will be of help to those planning a similar venture in future.

During one of the many organising committee meetings, we started by deciding on which artiste to choose. After settling on Velvet, I called up Maestro’s artiste management head, whose mobile phone number someone had given me. In this initial discussion, I found out that Velvet was free on the date of the function. If she was not, I’d have to fall back on the 2nd choice, 3rd choice and so on. The discussion also revolved around the fees and the number of songs she’s supposed to perform. The committee had decided the absolute maximum cost we could bear, so I was quite pleased when Maestro accepted our proposal.

That was the first and last time I talked to the head on the phone - later it was one of her staff and of course later, the manager in charge. Yes - the artiste will come to the function with his/her manager. Everything that concerns the artiste is supposed to be dealt through the manager. He needs to be no-nonsense, businesslike. Of course an artiste needs to show that s/he is friendly, greets everybody and smiles all the time: if s/he needs to make a quick getaway for whatever reason, it would be impossible to do so. That’s why managers would seem to be obnoxious, especially when the artiste gets up close and personal with the fans during the photo session at the end of the dinner.

Oops, I’m rambling already. Back to the subject matter: Maestro then faxed the contract which ran into several pages, which I had to sign and return. The details include:

Fees - have to pay 50% of the agreed fees a.s.a.p. and the other 50% a few days before the function.

In addition to the agreed fees, you have to cough out additional costs:

Flight ticket - you’re supposed to provide KLIA - KKIA return ticket, business class, for both artiste and manager. That means AirAsia is a no-no. I did the e-ticketing, cheaper than going through a travel agent.

Accomodation - you’re supposed to provide rooms (one for each artiste and manager of course) in reputable hotels (the manager didn’t specifically ask for 5-star resorts, he just mentioned “a hotel that’s of OK standard”). Our function was held in Magellan Sutera, I put them up at Promenade: it was a cost issue. The new hotels at Warisan Square sounded tempting, but they seemed too new and I never went there before, one didn’t provide room service, the other one didn’t sound convincing enough on the room service part. This is a pertinent point because the manager didn’t want unwanted attention on the artiste: they’d not want to go out unnecessarily. Even at Magellan Sutera they preferred to wait backstage for the entrance, rather than at a more comfortable place outside.

Food & Beverage - you’re supposed to grant full signing facilities to them at their hotel. This is of course a big risk - you wouldn’t know how much food and drinks they’d order, and we all know the cost of room service, even at a mere 4-star hotel. The committee expressed concern about the possibility of costs soaring out of control because of this. I talked personally to Velvet about this, she assured me that it won’t happen. It didn’t.

Transportation - you’re supposed to provide *all* transportation: from/to airport/accomodation; from/to accomodation/performance venue, including for soundcheck in the afternoon. Hence, you’d need to do some liaising with the band/sound system guys - they must be ready by the set times. Lembaga Kebudayaan Sabah were truly professional, the head of the team called me on Sunday night to doublecheck on things. They were already setting up at 11am Monday, so by 3pm Velvet was rehearsing her 4 minus one songs and 1 live song without any hitch. After the soundcheck Velvet went for a hairdo at Centre Point, the driver had to wait for her; he could not join us for early dinner.

Dressing room - you’re supposed to provide this, but actually she can use her hotel room for this purpose. During the function itself, she only needs a waiting room. She’d go backstage via the “secret path” all good 5-star resorts have - so that she’d end up backstage in the waiting room (in reality Magellan Sutera’s kitchen).

Security personnel - you’re supposed to provide 2 persons to escort the artiste at all times, in addition to the driver. Can appoint big-sized colleagues for this task But perhaps due to the civility of the people of Sabah (no gone-berserk fans), the manager didn’t really follow-up on this one, so I just put the 2 assigned persons on-call.

Others:
Insurance coverage for the event, of course car insurance for the vehicle ferrying the artiste around must’ve been taken care of.

So as you can see, the cost can balloon up. Coupled with the stress of selling the tickets, of course you’d try to keep costs as low as possible In the end, we managed to sell more than 50 tables, not as many as we hoped for, but it was not bad.

Velvet, kau mimang malatup!

I think the answer to the question, for the great majority of the population, is a definite “yes”. Whether it’s the casual “Do you have 5 dollars? I forgot my wallet - will pay you tomorrow at the office” to taking out several simultaneous loans totalling a few billion dollars from multinational banks, it’s still basically the same idea: borrowing money, with a promise to pay it by a predetermined point in time.

Your truly of course borrow money all the time - most commonly from the equally loved and hated plastic. Not just from that of course: banks, cooperatives and loan sharks are also vying for my attention.

I think it’s definitely easy to gain access to money I might not be able to pay back later. In the last few months I have received at least three preapproved personal loan offers. No need to go through all the credit checks, all I needed to do was fill in a few details and sign on the dotted line. This is not to mention credit card marketers - if I said yes to them all, I think my wallet would’ve been several inches thick with plastic.

Having said all that, some times borrowing money is difficult to avoid. I’m building my own house, so a secured loan is in the works. Of course, unless I become the next person to make a quick buck from a Genting-related lucky number…