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February 10, 2007Madrid, SpainStaying in Madrid, Spain
I usually stay at a hotel called Quo Puerta Del Sol Hotel Madrid, which I book on www.ratestogo.com. It is located near the threatre district of Madrid, close to the metro station Sol and Sevilla. It is a short walk from the Prada museum and to the Sol. I find that partners that are located in Madrid tend to want the partners visiting to stay in hotels near their location for some reason, which doesn’t sit well with me as I always prefer to be nearer to the city centre areas, which is where the consortium social dinner is generally held. I will never forget before one of my trips to an FP5 project being held in Madrid, the host had only sent around the names of two hotels near their facility, which was located somewhere out near the Madrid airport. In the emails going around between partners about where they were staying, I sent one out stating that I was going to stay at the Quo Puerta Del Sol Hotel (which I had already stayed at a previous trip). Almost immediately after sending my email, one of the staff from the host company sent an email to everyone in a polite yet firm way that they should ignore my advice and it wasn’t a good idea for the partners to stay in the city centre as it would cost a lot of money and time to get a taxi from there to their office location. Even though this was long before Google maps came into existence, I had already researched that I could also get to their location via the Metro system but just kept quiet not wanting to draw the ire of the host and ended up staying out in the Quo Puerta Del Sol Hotel on my own. The first night there, I was able to walk around the city centre, go to a nice restaurant etc. The next morning, I took the metro out to the venue of the meeting and ended up arriving long before the other participants, who all ended up having to get taxis from their locations and got caught in horrific traffic jams around the business arks where the meeting was held. As an ironic twist, the social event on the first night was held in a famous Cubano restaurant in Madrid city centre and it was only a 5 minute walk from my hotel. All of the other participants had to taxi it back to their hotel from the venue while I took the metro, and then taxi downtown and then get a 30 minute taxi ride back to the hotel later that night after the meal. They were none to pleased. In addition, they all were complaining about the location of their hotels on the first night and how boring it was as one of them was alongside a motorway and they ended up having to get a taxi for the 2 km drive to the meeting venue anyway since there was a lot of road construction in the area and there were no safe footpaths to walk on. To this day, I have never figured out why this meeting host subjected all of these partners to this lousy information about where to stay in Madrid. It just didn’t make any sense. Also, I have never been able to figure out why he didn’t tell them to take the metro to the venue. In their recommendations, they only recommended taxis and never once mentioned the metro system, which had a stop less than 200 meters from their building. |
