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Top 5 Luxury Hotels in Blackpool

Blackpool has been one of major tourist destinations in the UK. If you plan to go for a holiday with loads of entertainment and fun, then Blackpool is the destination you should choose. Located along the coast of Irish Sea, It is a very beautiful place and that too, because of the seaside.

Blackpool is famous for its gratification and entertainment opportunities. Blackpool has several amusement parks, cinemas, and other entertainment facilities available all over the city.

Pleasure Beach Blackpool is the most anticipated and talked about amusement park of Great Britain. In fact, it is among the top 20 most visited attractions of the world. Surely, that makes Blackpool an exciting place to tour. There are many other attractions in the city, like the Blackpool tower, like the Winter Gardens, like the North, South and Central Pier and many more.

Despite all these exciting places, the main attraction is the beach of Blackpool. Of those who have been there, most of the people think that Blackpool beaches are the most appealing beaches in all Britain. Many B&Bs here are famous for their excellent breakfast and friendly behavior.

If you have already started planning to leave for Blackpool, then you should know where the hotels are and where the reservations can be done. Therefore we have listed the top 5 luxury hotels in Blackpool. They are as follows:

1. The Kings Hotel: If you are with your family and plan to enjoy the beach with the Pleasure Beach amusement park, The Kings Hotel is the place you should go. This one is among the finest, actually the finest luxury hotel, with an amazing decoration and distinctive facilities for families.

2. Belroy Hotel: Belroy Hotel is an outstanding hotel. Most of the tourists actually go for Belroy Hotel because of its location. It is central to every entertainment and social events place. Be it the Pleasure beach or Winter Garden or any other worth watching place.

3. Rubens Hotel: Among the best Blackpool Hotels, Rubens Hotel is luxurious to the core. That does not mean that it is expensive, according to many customers of Rubens, the pricing is nothing in comparison to the quality of services provided. Couples usually chose Rubens Hotel when to plan a visiting Blackpool.

4. The Ramsey Hotel: The Ramsey Hotel is the perfect hotel if you are planning to stay for a shorter period. Ramsey Hotel is famous because of its cleanliness. The rooms are spotless and lavish, with all the required comfort on the doorstep.

5. The Big Blue Hotel: Situated next to the Pleasure Beach amusement park, the Big Blue Hotel is a prolific Hotel with excellent facilities. The Big Blue Hotel is 5th in the list because of its price. They charge around £200 for a stay of two nights without any discounts. Though the package available is high but still it is worthy, it saves a lot of time travelling to and from the hotel to different locations.

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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.