My Favorite Hotel Arrivals
I’m always looking for the coolest possible kid experiences when we travel, and sometimes that includes hotel arrivals. You’re probably thinking: how can a hotel arrival be unique? You get off the plane, take a car or taxi to your hotel, and you’re there. But some hotels, either because of where they’re located, or because they’ve simply thought through ways to make the guest experience more interesting, have other options.
When Travelocity asked me to write about my favorite hotel arrivals, I thought back on all of our hotel stays and came up with six. And honestly, I haven’t heard of many that don’t match up with these categories. If you’ve had a unique arrival experience anywhere, please let me know about it! If there’s anywhere that lets you arrive by hot air balloon, or via dogsled, or stepping off a train directly into the hotel lobby, I want to do it!
Note: I’ll post a couple of my hotel arrivals below, but click through to the Travelocity post HERE to see them all. And yes, two of them were last month, in the Seychelles and Greenland, so perfect timing for Travelocity to choose this topic!
Rolls Royce
We’ve learned over the years to book airport transportation in advance. Sometimes we do that through private companies, but sometimes there’s a good reason to book with the hotel. Hong Kong’s Peninsula Hotel not only picks you up at the airport in a Rolls Royce – still the only time I’ve been in one – but a hotel employee meets you at your plane, walks you through the airport to immigration, waits with you for your luggage, and then walks you to the waiting car. I’ve typically taken a bus from the airport to my hotel, so this spoiled me for all future arrivals! And we had seen the Rolls Royce arrival on The Amazing Race just a few months before, so we asked our driver about it and, sure enough, he had driven one of the teams. How cool is that?
In our Rolls Royce between the airport and hotel
Arriving at the Peninsula Hong Kong
Paragliding
Two years ago my 10-year-old daughter was planning our around-the-world trip and we needed a stop between Paris and Indonesia. I wanted to find something unique to suggest and a friend asked if I had heard of the paragliding entrance at Six Senses Zighy Bay in Oman. I hadn’t! I wrote to the hotel immediately and they confirmed that kids are able to paraglide, since they’re strapped to the hotel’s paragliding expert, so we were in.
The hotel is amazing anyway, and well worth a journey from Dubai, but the paragliding entrance was the coolest. On the journey from Dubai you stop on the side of a mountain above the resort. You get a quick safety briefing, are strapped to the resort’s paraglider, and you take off towards the beach and the hotel entrance. Your luggage is taken down by car. The day we arrived there wasn’t enough wind for me to go, but my daughter was a lot lighter so she was fine. She loved it!
Paragliding down to the Six Senses Zighy Bay
From my daughter’s perspective
Click HERE to see our other four amazing hotel arrivals in my Travelocity post. And please let me know if you’ve experienced an amazing hotel arrival anywhere!
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