Cheap Hotels Answer To Your Meeting Problems?

Jon just sent me this link….What do you think? Think you could get your executives to stay at a budget hotel?

A lesson from the UK: Members of U.S. Congress could save taxpayers millions by using budget hotels
Posted by Arthur Frommer

A recent article from The Daily Telegraph tells us how a low-cost British motel chain has shamed some M.P.s into scaling down their hotel needs. Is there a lesson here for our own Senators and members of the House?

The hotel company, Premier Inns (www.premierinn.com), determined that if Members of Parliament and civil servants in its country would be willing to forgo luxury hotels on their business trips and pick its budget motel rooms instead, their travel expenses would drop from £43 million a year to £24 million a year.

Seizing the moment to promote itself as an affordable place to stay, it has been contacting government offices to ask them to switch for the good of the British taxpayer. (Naturally, Premier Inn would stand to benefit from the switch, too.)

One British newspaper columnist saw the request this way:

After all, the hotels have the same facilities as the ones MPs and their hangers-on usually stay in: tea and coffee, internet access and cable TV, beds. Everything in fact, except an adult entertainment channel on the TV. Which I suppose means the idea will never take off.

I agree with that columnist that a budget hotel room is all you need, and if our own elected leaders were willing to rent them on a regular basis, the savings to the U.S. taxpayer would be absolutely enormous. I wonder why taxpayers here haven’t insisted on the kind of switch proposed by Premier Inns?

What do you think?