South China Morning Post

August 10, 2003

Asian hotels menu aims for taste - p. 24


After visiting 300 Asian hotels this year and last, Jon Stonham spent his holiday at a mate's place.

The mate may have been a lower priority than the place, given that it was in Tuscany. But either way, Stonham could carry no more complimentary soaps or sewing kits. "I can't spend another night in a hotel," he said before leaving Hong Kong.

The 38-year-old chief executive of asia-hotels.com has devoted the past 18 months to compiling his first book. He boasts of its uniqueness, but admits that his first taste of proofreading 320 hoardcopy pages had him pining for an easily adjusted online screen.

Asia's Best Hotels and Resorts was born from the same idea that produced Stonham's Hong Kong-based website in 1997, "Out of the frustration of finding really good information on hotels."

The site now has 60 staff. When it launched a survey in March last year about the best accommodation on two continents - Australia and Asia - and every room service bell in between, 42,000 people responded. Stonham took his data to Insight Guides hoping to produce a "succulent" book that would inspire travel, rather than guide tourists around.

"We wanted to leave a really tasty morsel with the reader so they'd want to eat more," says Stonham. "We're trying to get people's creative juices going so they go: Wow, I want to go there."

The survey's respondents recommended 3, 813 hotels, more than 10 times the number Stonham's book could hold. The former engineer created a logarithm to narrow the list to the hotels attracting the most recommendations or the highest scores.

Stonham's chief editor, John Chan, and travel writer Ed Peters checked into the hotels, squeezing the list to 300 that satisfied all needs, then added seven that won few votes because they were in countries fewer people visit, such as Laos and Cambodia.

Stonham says his volume is alone in filling the gap between travel agents and guidebooks.

"I don't think I know of anything based on customer opinion, certainly nothing based on the views of 42,000 people," he says. "Most hotel or pub guides are paid for by the people in it or they are books on iconic hotels put together by travel writers.

"This book is fundamental to our website, which is based on the idea of using experienced travellers to take the risk out of travel. We can only inspect hotels every two or three years. We encourage views from consumers using the hotels everyday.

"The travel industry isn't really reliable. A lot of travel agents, especially in places like Hong Kong, don't go and see the products and they sell on commission. They won't tell you which are the specialist spas, which ones are on the beach, which ones are good for families. They don't know a thing about smaller, boutique hotels.

"The problem with guidebooks is that they are destination-oriented. Lonely Planet does a fantastic job with the fun of travelling from A to B. [Founder] Tony Wheeler will wince when I see him next, but accommodation is a fairly weak section of Lonely Planet. Their writers don't see all the hotels and the pricing changes by the time the books come out.

"The problem with the web is that you go to a hotel's site and you find a sales brochure. We're trying to skip that and go straight to feedback."

"People living in Asia travel quite a lot. It's not like the two-week annual holiday of Europeans. People here go away very frequently for weekends in Thailand or Bali or wherever.

"The aim is to get the views of people who have travelled and encourage them to pick up the book everytime they're looking for holiday ideas."