Mt Rushmore Vacation - Gay Friendly Hotels and Accommodation - Are They Really Gay Friendly Or Just After the Pink Dollar?

And advertising their services as 'gay friendly', or even Euro, yen, pound, in these difficult times for business it seems that many more businesses are chasing the 'Pink Dollar'. But travel agents who are now offering gay friendly holidays; and not for just hotels, not only in Greece but around the world, just lately I have been getting more than usual the number of alerts from 'Google Alerts' for gay hotels and travel,  . Before they close, maybe two, without exception they have lasted only a year! Just for gay and lesbian travellers, albeit only small, presumably expecting to make a killing by renting apartment blocks and even going as far as building a whole gay resort, during that five years various other people have come up with gay accommodation on Crete. In the gay accommodation industry, i do try to keep my finger 'on the pulse' of what is happening not only locally but worldwide, greece for the last five years, having been running a gay hotel on Crete.

But in general this is probably the only place on their web site where the word 'gay' or 'lesbian' is to be seen; some of whom have been thoughtful enough to put 'gay' or 'gay friendly' in their web site search terms, and almost without exception the hotels on offer are just ordinary hotels, and also many that already existed has proved an interesting experience just lately as the same hotels appear over and over again, taking a brief look at some of the new sites that have sprung up,  !

So it seems that if you are gay or lesbian then you will automatically be able to afford room rates that start at EUR150 per night excluding breakfast? The other notable feature of virtually all of these hotels is that they are all in the upper price and luxury bracket;  .

And you still have to take a shower because you can't use soap in a Jacuzzi, and then you get out looking like a white prune, (or maybe I have been watching the wrong sort of movies), added to which you never know what was going on it in it yesterday, i can never see the point of spending ages in a lukewarm bath with jets of water and bubbles bouncing ones testicles around. For one avoid Jacuzzis, i  and. (you would think at that price they could afford to pay a cleaner to work until 6pm); because you arrive at 6pm and they throw you out at 10am the following day, none of which you are going to use, your own Jacuzzi on the balcony and so on, private golf course, tennis courts, but while it might be nice to occasionally spend a night in a 5 star hotel with health spa, now I don't know about all of you,  .

What we need is clean comfortable accommodation at a reasonable price, even guesthouse owners and we just do not have that kind of money to spend, teachers, nurses, cleaners, some of us are rubbish collectors, just because you are gay does not mean you have pots of dosh! Get anything to eat except the complementary chocolate on the pillow; and after all that you have just spent three weeks (or more) food money and didn't   .

But then I am not in the business of lining another companies pockets or allowing them to ride off my back and all the hard work I have put into my business, i get agents approach me and seem disappointed that they are only going to make 15 euros out of a one week stay and nothing at all for anything less than 3 nights! I have a sneaking feeling that it is because they are the only hotels that can afford to pay the agents a reasonable commission. So why do all these 'gay' web sites list this type of accommodation;  ?

500 straight guests staying in the same hotel and nobody really cares whether you are gay or not because they don't even know your name, you can quite easily disappear into the throng of 2! Gay anonymous I call it not gay friendly. Che, with three children and who spend all day by the pool while the children are in the non-English speaking crè how does that fit in with the rest of the guests who always seem to be families from other parts of Europe? And then we come to the gay friendly part;  .

That and the distance to the nearest gay club, this is usually one of the first questions I get asked before guests even make the booking. If you really want to check if a hotel is gay friendly then ask the receptionist where the nearest nudist beach is located;  .

Before coming back to me and announcing that nude sunbathing was not allowed, and talked to a member of the service staff in what sounded Spanish, none of them English, very fluently, dealt with some other guests in various languages, the girl on the desk looked rather bemused. I tried this at one of my local 5 star hotels where I had the pleasure of staying at someone else's expense for two nights.

And then came back with the reply that there were no homosexuals in this area, this struck a chord because she turned to colleague and asked him! This confused her even more so I expanded on the theme and asked about bars for homosexuals. Obviously as she was a mine of non-information and as I was in a daring mood I asked her if there were any gay bars close by;  .

Not forgetting the quite classy but very small soap and things in the bathroom. The ones where the foil top suddenly gives way and you splash most of the contents over the carpet and yourself. You know the ones; yes, and 2 of those little plastic pots of milk, 2 biscuits in foil wrapper, 2 tea bags and 2 little sachets of coffee, with a nice little terrace outside where I could hold a conversation with the guests in the next apartment, clean, comfortably furnished, so for EUR250 per night I got a quite nice room,  .

Seems to me like it doesn't! So where does the gay friendly come in;  ?

And if they don't know they should, where the nearest gay bar is, look for the place where they can tell you where the nearest nudist beach is! You want a gay hotel then look for the web site that says 'gay' or 'lesbian' in black and white on the home page;  .