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Coachella Hotels / Music Festival Hotels / Palm Springs Hotels / Kiwi Collection / → All Tags

Yes, It's Time to Book Your Hotel Room for Coachella

Are these people so happy they have a hotel room to return to once the concert ends?

While the festival passes for the 2012 Coachella Music Festival don't go on sale until Friday, there is no doubt that if you want to attend, then you better start making your travel plans now.

Jaunted reports that flights to Palm Springs are still open and still, for the most part, doable averaging about high $300s for cross-country flights (the Virgin America flight from JFK to PSP at $709.20 excluded.) But after you've got your flight down, you need to start looking for a place to sleep. Unless you're cool with camping it or AirBnB-ing it. Which we are not.

This year, Coachella has decided to split the festival up into two weekends--April 13-15 and April 20-22 which means your chances of actually getting a ticket and a hotel room are a lot better. Jaunted has already noted that the first weekend of the festival is the more expensive one when it comes to airline prices. Does the same hold true for hotel rooms? Let's see.

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Snapshot / Hotel Technology / Hotel Design / Plug Panels / Monte Carlo Hotels / Kiwi Collection / → All Tags

No French, Italian or English Needed to Understand What This Means

Where: 40 Avenue Princesse Grace, Monte Carlo, Monaco, 98000

You know how much we love our plug panels here at HotelChatter so imagine our excitement when we checked into the Monte Carlo Bay Resort in Monaco and saw this on the wall underneath the TV--a plug panel that all languages can understand! (Most of the resort signs are in French, Italian and English.)

We also loved the generously-sized flat-screen TV that hung on the wall opposite the bed. After staying in four different hotels in Europe before this one, we were starting to think that Euros did not like big flat-screen TVs. But the Monte Carlo Bay Resort had this one all turned on with a personalized greeting too.

Room rates at the hotel, which is part of the Societe des Bains Mers, start around 500 Euros a night for a city view room. We actually booked ours through Kiwi Collection for 319 Euros a night which included a great breakfast spread every day. (We may have eaten three croissants one day. Don't judge.)

Hotel Collections / Hotel Booking Sites / Kiwi Collection / → All Tags

What is The Kiwi Collection?

Typically, we don't go crazy over "collections" of otherwise unaffiliated hotels as membership for these groups are often bought and there's not much scrutiny about whether the hotel is living up to its promises.

But when we were introduced to the Kiwi Collection, we were turned on by the idea that not only are these hotels not allowed to buy membership in, they can be removed instantly from the group once the Kiwi Collection sees the hotel not performing to its standards.

The Kiwi Collection, despite its name, is based in Vancouver with offices in Sydney and London (Kiwi was chosen as the name because it means the same thing in every language.) The collection describes its luxury collection of hotels as "created by consumers for consumers." The staff at Kiwi are constantly traveling the world, adding and removing hotels from their list.

Kiwi's reviewers do not pay for their rooms but they've developed a rigorous scoring system, which you can see here. Currently, the collection has over 2,100 hotels in 127 countries (most of these are luxury and design hotels) which is to put it simply, a hell of a lot.

But Kiwi maintains that each hotel has been "personally reviewed and vetted" before they extend an invite for the hotel to join their collection. Similarly, the hotel can be dropped if reviewers notice a downturn in service or accommodations.

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