Hard Times at the Crowne Plaza

There are three ways of getting an extra star for your hotel’s rating, and only one of them involves nice facilities and good service. Of the remaining two, the only legal choice is to add on extra restaurants, pools, and other random-assed stuff ‘til the judges just cave in from embarrassment. It doesn’t matter if you’ve converted the janitor’s closet into a computer center by storing the fax machine there; that line in your brochure means an automatic extra star for you.

This seems to be the tact taken by the Alice Springs Crowne Plaza. Yes, it’s in the middle of the desert. Yes, it’s staffed by locals - and, yes, you don’t get much more local than the Australian outback. Yes, it has to truck all the food and materials 1500km. But Las Vegas has to do all that stuff too and somehow they seem to have gotten the hang of this crazy hotel thing without too much difficulty.

Zaf and Amg are driving down through Australia’s Northern Territory into the Red Center. Natural hazards include suicidal wallabies, local rodeos, rancid fish n’ chips, and if that wasn’t enough, a big-assed scary desert with rocks in. So when you’ve spent all day dodging road trains in an three year old Nissan Pulsar, filled with contraband produce and an underaged Swiss hitchhiker, you start hoping that Alice Springs means a return to civilization.

Well, it doesn’t, but we didn’t know that. We booked in at the four-star Crowne Plaza, shed our hitchhiker, and drove through town in search of the revered logo. It was constructed from corrugated aluminum, the kind familiar to us from the infrequent cattle-processing stations along the highway. Inside was a little nicer - definitely up to Econo-Lodge or Days' Inn level.

The bloke at the desk was courteous, right up until he noticed that we’d booked through an online retailer. You could see his face go ‘Ohhh…’ as he made a few extra notes on the computer. The room contained a stained carpet, ripped wallpaper, bare mattresses, and a weird smell. The single forlorn picture on the wall subscribed to the ever popular 'Art By the Pound' school of design. And the lock on the balcony was broken, something you really care about when you’re on the ground floor in a town famous for its substance abuse and you're traveling with a sizable amount of electronics. We waited about 45 minutes for them to decide on another room scruffy enough for us.

It was downhill from there. The maintenance guys next door decided to have a drilling competition. We were asked to close our door so they could chuck a huge mound of trash off the roof onto our balcony. At our Indian dinner they gave us the wrong bill... twice. The lunchtime salad contained shredded credit card; exhaustive investigation proved that it was, in fact, slices of fossilized parmesan.

Now, if I don’t check in once in a while, work is sure to realize that I’m not at my desk anymore. We’d booked because they claimed to have some sort of in-room internet. What did this mean? They offer a phone jack. Not a separate one, but the bloke at the desk gave us full permission to unplug the phone and use its cord to ‘try to dial up AOL or whatever’.

I appreciate that four stars is not actually that great. But there’s an important lesson in this for all the ‘Silver Pines Motor Lodge With Color TV’s of the world. That extra star doesn’t require anything but a spare pool and desperate clientele. Yep, we’re staying. Why? Because there’s nothing but rocks and dingoes from here to Adelaide - where I hear they have a Hyatt Regency.

zaf: yeah, this one isnt strictly about food, but we were getting too much good press.