Okay so I just got off the phone with the Blue Bay Lodge management and I am pleased at the outcome.

They are admitting that their service was not up to scratch as it should have been, and that the person on duty handled the matter in a wrong way. I got offered another night stay at their place with breakfast included or a full refund. I took the refund as I wont be going to the west coast anytime soon again.

Would just like to thank the Blue Bay Lodge management for their swift response and the professional way they resolved it. Some South African companies can learn from these guys how bad customer service can be turned into good service again.

Blue Bay Lodge also known as Blouwaterbaai  is situated literally  meters from the white sandy beaches of Saldanha near the town of Langebaan.

Me and my wife was invited to a special occasion of two of our friends that got married the past weekend at Blue Bay Lodge in Saldanha. Now let me start by saying how Blue Bay Lodge describes their nice, or shall I say not so nice place to stay. “The elegantly gabled Blue Bay Lodge is built only meters above the wide, sandy beaches of Saldanha Bay; a tranquil South African fishing village lying approximately 120 kilometers North of the legendarily beautiful Cape Town. Situated in the relaxing privacy of the resort, the hotel offers guests privacy, first class accommodation, and a wide range of services and activities.
‘Privacy and tranquillity’ is our tag line. The hotel has comfortable, five star ‘en suite’ rooms, broad terraces where drinks are served to guests as they relax watching whales and porpoises glide by, before being served delicious meals in its charming a la carte restaurant, the well known ‘Blue Bay Cafe’.”

Now after visiting the Blue Bay Lodge website and reading the above I was impressed and the R800 per night price tag kind of made sense. This impressiveness soon disappeared after I booked in and walked into the suite.

Me and my wife arrived about an hour and a half before the wedding was suppose to start, enough time for us to take a nice shower and bath after the hour and a halves drive from Cape Town. As we entered the suite we walked into a small kitchen with bathroom to the right. First thing my wife noticed it that there was no bath only a shower and she already did her hair before we left Cape Town. As we walked into the room my jaw dropped to the ground when I saw that we are sleeping in a 3×3 size room with just enough space to move around the bed.

So we proceeded to get our stuff ready for the wedding, I sat down on the bed and notices that this is not a double bed, but in fact two single bed pushed together to make it look like a double bed, and the worst thing was the there wasn’t even a double bed duvet over the two single beds. Each bed had their own single bed duvet. Now I’m a real calm man, but at this point I was starting to get upset, because for a fee of almost R800 for the night I really did expect more from the three star graded Blue Bay Lodge.

It was time to get into the shower to freshen up after the drive and get ready for the wedding, getting in the shower and turning on warm tap there I stood for a good 5 minutes waiting for some warm water. Yes that correct a 3 star hotel that doesn’t have warm water, I must have overseen that part on the Blue Bay Lodge website. Now I let the warm water slip, thought maybe for some odd reason they turn of the geysers during day and it was hot so I took a cold shower. However the next morning while getting ready to go to breakfast there was still no warm water, not even a little bit of warm water.

The wedding was fabulous apart from the ceremony being held next the the pool where the staff did absolutely nothing about the people swimming and screaming while two people stood in front busy with a very moment in their life. Other than that I would say the wedding went quite well, just one or two persons entering the function area that was not meant to be there.

The morning after the wedding the wife and I headed to the restaurant after not showering due to no warm water as stated, and proceeded to go and get a cup of coffee. This was when a gentleman that worked the bar the previous night asked us for our names and checked a list. He then told us that our names are not on the list and that we would have to pay extra to have breakfast. Suddenly I just had enough of Blue Bay Lodge and their so called first class accommodation and service.

The day I made the booking I asked for bed and breakfast and after receiving the reservation details and seeing that it is almost R800 just for the night I had no doubt that it had to include breakfast, seeing that I did ask for a room for me and my wife with breakfast in the morning.

I told the guy how disappointed I am in the Blue Bay Lodge establishment and that I would like to see a manager, and he started getting really cocky with me saying that he is the manager. That’s just where I had really enough bullshit from Blue Bay Lodge and their staff and decided to proceed back to my room and packed my car and took off to Cape Town again where I could have a nice warm shower in the comfort of my own home and sleep on a bed next to my wife under the same duvet.

If you are thinking of visiting Blue Bay Lodge or would like some accommodation in the Saldanha area, I would urge you to stay as far away from these guys as possible. I have sent through an email early this morning, and phoned requesting to speak to a manager but no one is available to talk to me. Blue Bay Lodge is not worth a three star tourism grading, and for sure not worth R800 for a one night stay.

I’ll keep you guys updated as to what happened in the end, if and when someone from Blue Bay Lodge phones me.

A while back Microsoft announced that they will be rolling in a update on the XBox 360 console to enable users to Twitter, Facebook and Last.FM from the comfort of their couch on a big screen TV.

So last night I decided that its time to test out this functionality. Using the applications is really straight forward, just log in with your credentials and away you go.

The Twitter interface looks really sleek and nice, but just don’t try to do a status update with your remote control. Writing the update is really time consuming as you need to move around the on-screen keyboard with your remote control to find the correct letters, not worry, all I did to avoid this was pop in a usb keyboard and all was well again.

All the the Xbox 360 now lacks is a browser, would be cool to be able to open up the links on tweets and view them. Me hold thumbs that they do not implement IE on the Xbox 360.

Here is a screenshot taken from GameSpy

Got 13 Google wave invites to give away.

If you would like a invite to Google Wave leave a comment with your gmail email address filled in and I will send you a invite to that address.

Remember I only got 13 invites left for now so first come first serve.

With the Mayan calendar ending in 2012 never before has a date in history been so significant to so many cultures, so many religions, scientists, and governments.

2012 is an epic adventure about a global cataclysm that brings an end to the world and tells of the heroic struggle of the survivors, a large group of people that must deal with natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, typhoons and glaciers.

Starring John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt and Thandie Newton.

2010 will premiere in local cinemas on Friday 4th of December 2009.

Swype is a new way to type on a touch screen phone.

As seen in the video above, showing a side-by-side comparison of typing on the Omnia II versus typing on the iPhone, the way you type using Swype is to literally swipe your finger from one letter to another as fast as you can.

Phones will start shipping with Swype technology from next year, including a new android phone.

This Friday the 27th of November 27dinner will be taking place in Cape Town at the Knead Bakery, Wembley Square.

Join in for the last 27 dinner of 2009 in Cape Town. An evening of inspiring talks and superb conversation with smart and talented web, mobile, media and marketing people.

The Talks

• Justin Hartman: Founder / CEO of Afrigator. Justin will be giving us some exiting news about Afrigator (South Africa’s largest blog aggregator)
• Raymond De Villiers, CEO of Wisdom Games: Raymond will be talking about Serious Play: Using computer games for corporate learning
• Dave Duarte: Founder of Huddlemind will MC

Remember that there is only 100 places available so head on over to 27dinner to book your place.

MyScoop the new South African blog aggregator and social bookmarking site by Nicolas Duncan has built upon what the community requested.

MyScoop launched about a month ago with limited functionality just as Amatomu shut its doors. The blog aggregator started out with only functionality to fetch the latest blog entries from subscribed blogs and displaying it. Now things has changed and on track to provide the same functionality that Afrigator has to offer and Amatomu used to offer.

Nicolas Duncan has improved MyScoop allot during the last month and added a badge and ranking system. MyScoop now has the ability to keep track of your site hits and what pages users access on your blog. MyScoop also introduced a ranking system that keeps track of what blogs is most popular and what blog posts receives the most traffic, they also added a stats section to the control panel that shows you how many hits your site had on different dates.

The possibilities are endless now that MyScoop has the badge system in place and can gather all sorts of stats from your blog to display to you. What I would like to see is perhaps a Unique visits and Page views combined graph, and maybe one to display weekly, monthly and yearly stats.

Also perhaps Nicolas can provide us with some insight as to how the ranking of the blogs is calculated.

If you have any suggestions about features you would like to see on MyScoop, please leave a comment.

By now every body have heard of, or signed up to the limited R29 per GB ADSL offer from Afrihost.

This offer by Afrihost, known for its hosting, has set the wheel rolling to drive broadband prices down in South Africa. Although Afrihost is only offering it as a limited promotion, if you sign up during the promotion you will always be charged R29 per GB for as long as you are a customer.

Now Afrihost has again disrupted the local internet market by slashing their price by another 50% if you top up. If you are a Afrihost customer you can now top up at R14.50 per GB. This is the cheapest per GB price for international bandwidth South Africa has ever seen, it even comes close to what other ISP charge for 1 GB local only bandwidth.

If you haven’t by now signed up to the cheapest ADSL in South Africa, what are you waiting for? Sign up here for cheap international ADSL bandwidth, or if you are looking to host a website why not visit Afrhost site to sign up for one of their great hosting packages.

PS. I dropped my long time ISP WebAfrica and switched over to Afrihost about 2 month ago and haven’t looked back since, saving me a total of 50% on my 5GB cap at home.