Month: October 2024

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Restaurants With Live Music Are Drawing Crowds in Our Bad Economy – 3 No-Cost Ways to Get Live Music

The sales of most weak-performing restaurants can be traced to the fact that there is nothing unique about the restaurant.

In this bad economy a restaurant has to be unique to successful. Live music can make almost any dining experience more enjoyable and it will bring in a crowd, but how can a small restaurant afford to have live music?

People are still eating out and many restaurants I visit have a waiting line — even in the middle of the week. These restaurants have a waiting line because they are delivering an enjoyable dining experience and they are unique in some way.

If your restaurant is not unique, consider making it unique by adding live music

Many people are choosing to dine where they can enjoy live music. Of course, live music costs money, but musicians are hurting too and many very good musicians are now willing to play for a lot less they used to. Also, young musicians are a great source of good musical talent.

Be creative and find innovative ways to have live music in your restaurant. The conventional technique of paying good money for a three to five member band to play is probably  not the way to go in this tight economy. 

Here are three creative ways successful restaurants are getting great live music for little to no cost:

  • One restaurant I visit a lot has a 13 year old girl playing the violin. She’s good and she really draws in a crowd — the cost is very low.
  • Another restaurant lets a local music school have some of their best students play one or two nights a week. The music is good, the cost is zero and all of the relatives of the young musician come to eat and hear little Johnny or Sally play.
  • Another restaurant has jam sessions most nights and they don’t have to pay the musicians anything (except for furnishing them a pitcher or two of beer). They have a different type of music every night — Sunday nights is jazz, Friday nights is country, etc. They have more musicians wanting to play (for free) than they have room for.

In other words, be creative and innovate, but do whatever it takes to give your restaurant an unique advantage and adding live music may be just what your restaurant needs.

Peter Drucker, who was the world’s greatest expert on management, said that…

Innovation is the only real and lasting competitive advantage any business owner can ever have.

Right now, live music is one of the most innovative and under-used techniques for making a restaurant unique.

Bottom line: There’s money to be made in the restaurant business in this bad economy and as an independent restaurant manager, you are in a better position than chain restaurant managers to take advantage of the situation because you can make decisions fast and change with the times.

One thing is for sure, you may not be able to make money in the restaurant business if you keep doing what you have always been doing — but I think you already know that.

Now is the time to go make things happen and live music may be just what your restaurant needs.

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Finding Online Travel Reviews For New Zealand

Kelly was determined to find the nicest little cheap place to stay that she could find on her trip to the South Island of New Zealand. She read some online travel reviews for New Zealand and found this cool wee place that looked perfect. Cheap as chips, and pretty too. She thought she’d done well, and used the same site to book nearly all her free nights away from the tour she’d also found online.

When she arrived at the motel late at night, her heart sank. There was a really good reason it was cheap. It might have been the middle of winter, but there was no heating, the beds were barely covered with a sheet and the thin walls rattled every time the neighbours so much as whispered (let alone the wind that tore up the valley at 2am that morning).

Kelly later discovered the review had been written by the owner of the motel, the pictures were really out of date, and there were many amazing (but still cheap) places nearby she could have stayed in instead.

It can feel a little daunting to know if the information you are reading is a true travel review, or merely an advertorial paid for with free accommodation or from a professional paid writer. Finding out the true story of any place, tour or event is best done when the information is coming from people just like you – travellers wanting the best experiences New Zealand has to offer.

Online travel reviews are the best ways to find out all the secret gems, and avoid the scary places like Kelly’s disaster. You can often find them by trawling through blogs, and people’s online travel diaries but doing this is completely hit and miss and can take hours. Finding a site that provides you with a mix of comments and reviews from hundreds of travellers who have placed online travel reviews after their New Zealand travels is the most ideal way of finding the secret spots (like the awesome cafe in Kingsland, Auckland or the scary Coromandel caves you can discover for free, or the gold digging brothers in Hokitika who’ll make you scones and tell you ghost stories with a cup of billy tea.)

So how do you find New Zealand online travel reviews you can trust? Here are some simple tips when looking for online recommendations:

1) Look for a site that is full of personal experiences
While one person suggesting a place is awesome, fifty people suggesting the same thing, with a few frank comments about any issues or problems is far better. Kelly certainly wished she could have warned other travellers about her motel disaster.

2) Look for one that lets real people comment
Some sites are really just travel agency sites, with lots of comments from people who have been given free trips to write about. This means the bias can be slanted a little more positively than may be due in a real response to the place

3) Look for one that caters for a wide range of people
Even if you are on a mega budget you might want the occasional night of luxury (ooh that hot shower feels great after a week tenting in the South Island.) If you’ve got a comfortable budget, the more luxury orientated sites might focus only on the high cost tours and places to stay, and so much of New Zealand’s gems can be found in places where the cost isn’t that high. Find the secret local places that other travellers have found by sharing a few quiets in the pub with the locals.

The best thing about a community driven online travel review site is you’ll get to comment on your New Zealand adventure as well. You’ll have Kelly and her mates telling you what they loved, and what they hated. And then after you’ve experienced what other people have suggested, you too have a chance to let other’s know what you thought.

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Bored With Skydiving? Try These Base Jumping Destinations

BASE jumping has been popularised in a number of films, including second Laura Croft Tomb Raider, several James Bonds and xXx. It is also a growing favourite among extreme sportsmen and women who tire of the thrill of skydiving. The BASE in BASE jumping stands for Buildings, Antennae, Spans and Earth, which are the four categories of fixed objects from which participants can jump.

People have been BASE jumping for decades (recorded jumps go back to the 1960s) but it was film-maker Carl Boenish who first coined the term. In 1978, Boenish filmed the first BASE jumps made with ram-air parachutes using the freefall tracking technique. The jumps were made from El Capitan, in Yosemite National Park.

BASE jumping is more dangerous than skydiving: firstly, BASE jumpers have less distance to play with; they fall at lower speeds and have less aerodynamic control. They have to time the moment to open their parachutes perfectly and to do that they need to ensure that they are stable. A good launch is essential as a poor one can put the jumper into a tumble and tumbling compounds the difficulties of opening the chute. To minimise the danger (relatively speaking) BASE jumpers use specialised equipment, including harnesses, parachute containers and extra large pilot chutes.

A second danger, not associated with the physical jump, is arrest. Not all locations used sanction jumping, in fact, many jumps from buildings are not sanctioned and jumpers risk arrest for trespassing, breaking and entering, reckless endangerment and vandalism. Conscientious jumpers ask permission before leaping from buildings. Some destinations are more BASE jumper-friendly than others, for instance Perrine Bridge in Twin Falls, Idaho, allows BASE jumping all year-round, as do Norway’s Lysefjord and a number of sites in the European Alps.

Some of the most thrilling and most popular BASE jumping destinations around the world include:

• Perrine Bridge, Twin Falls, Idaho, (mentioned above), is the only US structure that allows BASE Jumping all year-round. At 486 feet above the Snake River, the bridge is one of the lowest jumping locations in the world, as a result jumpers hold onto small pilot chutes that deploy the main chute rather than rely on ripcords.

• Norway is very BASE jumper-friendly, it has two popular destinations: Troll Wall and Kjerag,. At 3600 feet, Troll Wall is the longest vertical drop in Europe, while Kjerag is close behind with a drop of 3200 feet.

• Angel Falls,, Venezuela is the highest waterfall in the world and offers a BASE jump of 2648 feet. It’s only for the most dedicated jumpers as they first have to brave the Venezuelan jungle before they reach it. All who have completed, however, believe the trip to be well worth it.

• Trango Towers,, Northern Pakistan is also a challenging destination as jumpers have to climb an almost sheer sheet of granite 4400 feet high before catching their breath and heading down in a fraction of the time it took it get up.

• Burj Khalifa,, Dubai, United Arab Emirates is the tallest building in the world, so it was inevitable that it would attract the attention of BASE jumpers. Nasr Al Niyadi and Omar Al Hegelan took the plunge in 2010, breaking the record for the highest BASE jump off a building (2200 feet).

• Meru Peak, Himalayas, is the location of the highest BASE jump in the world. An Australian jumped 6604m (21 666 feet) over the east face of Meru Peak in the Garhwal region of the Himalayas, in India.

• The cliff faces in Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland are notoriously challenging and, of course, exceedingly attractive for BASE jumpers. According to the website, jumps in the Lauterbrunnen valley are unsuitable for beginners, as the height of the sites make jumping technically difficult. It also cautions that the Lauterbrunnen valley has already claimed the lives of 10 BASE jumpers.

Of all extreme sports, BASE jumping has one of the worst fatality rates. It is this that makes so many jump spots illegal, as authorities don’t want any blood on their hands. It is also this that makes it so attractive to daredevils and thrill-seekers. So, if you’re going to jump, be responsible about it.