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For over 24 years the US Navy asked me as a condition of my employment to piss in a bottle on demand.  This happened on weekends, afternoons, getting off airplanes and a host of other scenarios, designed to catch drug users when they least expected it.  If I where to count I would say that I pissed in a bottle with direct observation of me doing so, well over 100 times in that 24 year career. I did so willingly and knew that drug use was strictly forbidden, and that utilization of any illicit non-prescribed drugs would result in my removal from the Navy with a discharge that would make getting a job very difficult.  I remain drug free having never smoked, snorted, shot up or whatever other terms they use for 47 years and would piss on demand again if need be.

So it literally pisses me off, that the teachers that teach my kids how to read, write, and hopefully get a decent education have blatantly refused through their union to participate in random drug testing. Why is it that nearly ever employer in this country can have drug testing in their workplace but a state paid teacher is given a pass when it comes to a drug test.

These drug test are effective in finding drug users /abusers who then can be referred to treatment and removed from our children’s classrooms.  The state of Hawaii, the Governor, the ACLU and teachers should simply be ashamed of themselves.

We demand a drug free zone in out schools, yet we have no way of policing the teachers that would rightly so investigate a student thought to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol.  Hawaii is well known for being very liberal in nature but I am simply ashamed at what has transpired, especially being the unions initially agreed to the testing as part of a contract negotiation. Let’s remove all of the provisions in that same contract and start over.

Teachers are often like Police Officers, they protect their own. Bad teachers are often simply transferred from school to school but yet rarely fired. Teachers should lead by example and proclaim in their classrooms I am drug free and I have the paperwork to prove it. Students respect teachers that lead by example and drug testing should be part of all educational settings.

All I can say is with 24 years flying in these types of planes, Ihave never been in one that did what this plane did. All I can say is that I would have loved to have been onboard. Simply insane and at the same time great flying as this could have ended very badly.

I have been really working hard to what I call open source my audience on my show. One of the shows fans launched a shop for the show where you can get all kinds of cool clothes, mugs etc.  Today I was made aware that a listener that is a GoDaddy fan, and a fan of the show launched a Godaddy Promo Code and information site that is promoting my shows codes. We will see if it makes a impact but kinda cool to see the grass roots stuff take off.

I read today that the Mayor of the City of Seattle has applied to take part in Google Fiber for Communities. Being Hawaii has so very few broadband choices and the service we do have has not advanced very much in the past 12 years. I think this is exactly what is needed to bring some awareness to what is possible through a very high speed Internet connection.

With a 1gbps pipe I could run a 24/7 live Internet TV station with a lot of bandwidth to spare. Time Warner here in Hawaii has been very very slow in rolling out more bandwidth. Sometimes I feel like we live in a third world country. I travel to Japan and or the mainland and am astonished at the bandwidth speeds my techie friends are able to subscribe to.

I would hope that my friends and neighbors here in Makakilo will submit our communities name to the list Google is compiling for consideration of the roll-out of 1gbps fiber internet connectivity.

Shoko and I have wanted to do a food review site for a while now. We finally got it kicked off and look forward to bringing some great Hawaii Food Reviews along with reviews of places I eat while on travel. First few entries are online now at LocalFoodReview.com

Why is it that the only place these days I seem to get any satisfaction is posting in my blog and then waiting a week or so for someone at corporate to respond.

First of all you all know I travel a great deal.  I stay nearly exclusively at Hilton Hotels partially because I am vested there in Hilton Honor Award Points and because I stay more than 60 days a year I get some small privileges as a diamond member from time to time.

This weekend my wife, two of our kids and I decided to stay for a single night at the local Hilton Hawaiian Village so that we could attend my sons Hula contest today. When we arrived there must have been 50 people waiting to check in. Because of my Diamond status I was able to bypass most of that line and only waited 30 minutes to check in at the Gold/Diamond counter versus what had to be a much longer time for the rest of the guest. Check in was smooth, the check in clerk was great. The clerk/computer put us in the Diamond tower which as it turned out the room’s are the oldest as compared to the rest of the towers, we did not get offered a room upgrade as usually happens but seeing how many people where in line to check in I guess they had a full house.

My wife’s comment was quite snarky she said if she was the manager she would put her most valuable customers in the wing that is the most modern? I guess it was my fault for not asking the check in clerk, honestly I did not know there was a difference. Shortly after we arrived we hit the pool at about 3pm, and to say it was crowded was a understatement. They had issued us wrist bands at check in to identify us as hotel guest but I can say that nearly 50% of the people in the pool and using the lounge chairs did not have arm bands and the staff did not seem to care, you could tell by what folks had carried in that a lot of folks had simply crashed the pool for a Saturday afternoon swim with the kids.

Going back to the hotel room at 6pm we wanted to hit the showers to get cleaned up to go out to eat. Surprisingly the room had only 2 bath towels, I had 4 bodies to cycle through the shower.  Calling house keeping it took them 40 minutes to bring us two more towels. As my wife was entering the shower she exclaims honey you have to see this. I go in the bathroom and look at the area above the shower area. The ceiling above the bathtub / shower contained a exhaust fan which was a little odd but what made me cringe was that there was mold everywhere impossible to miss if your cleaning the shower.  Not only that but the fixtures in the tub were not sealed properly. I have stayed in some shit holes before that have had mold in the shower but I never expected it at a Hilton Hotel.

After we got all cleaned up after I convinced my wife not to check out and go home,  I called the manager and discussed the mold situation. He said he would send someone to the room. I explained we were leaving for dinner and they could come in at 7:30.  I expected initially he would have simply moved us to a different room but maybe there were no rooms to give.   When we got back from dinner at 9pm the room door was open and two housekeeping staff and who I assumed  was the house keeping manager in the room with several bottles of bleach and scrub brushes.  The stench of bleach could be smelled all the way down the hallway. The idiots from house keeping  had not opened the patio door to get some circulation going  which compounded the issue. We went on the patio and hung out till they finished. But here is what blows me away. House keeping did not say a single word they just packed up and left, inspecting the bathroom it was a 100% better but the only way they are going to be able to get all the mold out is to expend some more elbow grease on the situation and some paint. The fan above the shower and tub explain to me they have  major issue that they have tried to band aid.

Ok were past mold hurdle, now its time to talk about breakfast the next morning, as a subnote last week I spent 4 days in the San Jose Hilton and as a Diamond member they have a breakfast area where they have a continental breakfast. As I said in the beginning I stay at a lot of Hiltons and the breakfast fare is pretty similar, fruit, juice, muffins, some sort of eggs, cereals, toast.  Nothing very fancy at all but usually a great breakfast that no one can bitch about after all it’s free. The breakfast at the Hilton Hawaiian Village was shit, they had two kinds of fruit, some weird pastries no one was eating that looked a week old, no orange juice, water with lemon in it, and some sort of red juice that my kids liked. Thats it! When I asked the person running the breakfast if they had any eggs or cereal I got this look like I was from outer space.  So much for their continental breakfast I was beyond disappointed and picked some food up at the ABC store a hour later.

Lets talk about Bathrooms, having my kids along as soon as they put something in their mouth they have to use the bathroom, taking my youngest to the restroom 20 feet away from the breakfast place the bathrooms was locked.  So I walked with him to the closest bathroom in the main lobby about 200 feet away. As we went through the main lobby I told the GM on duty about the locked bathroom hopefully he fixed it.But why would you lock a bathroom in a section of the hotel where you have guest running around? I guess they don’t have enough janitorial staff or something.

It is obvious, that Hawaii is considered a vacation destination and that Hilton Hawaiian Village cares very little about having repeat customers at this property.  If I had been there alone on business I probably would have moved to another property, in fact I hear the embassy suites up the street is much nicer. This plays into what I am hearing from people that do come here on business they are largely staying away from the Hilton Hawaiian Village because it is not designed to cater to a business crowd,  just tourist that in my opinion probably probably will not come back.  Maybe I have become spoiled and expect to much from Hilton Properties, there used to be a air of sophistication around the Hilton name. The hotel referenced here is not living up to that expectation.

I have no doubt that a tourist would have likely had the same result from management when it came to the mold, but just think, they go home and tell a 100 people about the mold and you have a lot of lost business.  Or people read this blog post and make a different accommodation consideration.

Here is what would have been a better experience. The staff and management control the number of people at the pool to guests only this fixes the over crowding, When I called and mentioned mold the first thing that should have happened was that a bell hop should have been dispatched to the room to collect our belongings and moved us to another room immediately.  The continental breakfast area at 9am on Saturday should have been stocked with what every other Hilton in the whole country has versus being a cheap charlie.

When we go to the beach we respect hotel properties and we do not crash the pools, we want the tourist to have a great time, if we visit friends at a hotel we buy a pool day pass if they are available and are conscious of our footprint.  I will say this, I have stayed at a number of the hotels downtown as we do these mini staycations on a regular basis, and if a friend of ours is coming from the mainland I am going to recommend some other properties from now on.  As I move into 2010 I am going to closely consider where I have been staying at,  maybe it is time to switch to a different chain of hotels. I never hear my friends bitching about Marriott or Hyatt chains I wonder if they would like the money I spend 60+ days a year in hotels.

If I am being pretentious then so be it. If you think I am spoiled so be it. Here is the deal when you go someplace and you spend your hard earned dollars, the experience is supposed to be top notch when it is advertised as top notch. I don’t expect to get 1-2 star treatment at 4-5 star properties.  If a Hilton Hawaiian Manager would like to talk to me feel free to call anytime 808-741-4923 and no I don’t want my money back, all I want is you to represent the chain you are part of and give due consideration to fact that if you pissed of someone local you probably do a lot more when you piss off someone from the mainland or Japan.

BTW the Cocktails from the bar were excellent, and the wait staff was friendly which was a highlight of the stay. But you need to go into Diamond 1177 and take a hour and fix the bathroom issues.

Maybe it is time to start doing these staycations more so I can go dig around in some other properties and see what the experience hotel visitors are having!

Update: Wednesday Sept 2nd: Today I received a call from the folks at Hilton Hawaiian Village over this blog post, first of all I want to say that they where very gratious and apologetic, I re-voiced what had happened and it was clear to me that our experience is not one that they want other guest to have and have addressed this with the various managers in the hotel. I appreciate the fact that they where being pro-active. He did offer me a credit on my credit card which I declined to take as we recieved fair value for our stay, and even though we had some issues I don’t feel taking the refund would have been fair.

He mentioned that they did have some issues that weekend with rooms that where in excess capacity of what they should have been and that they understood this may have led to some of the pool issues.  I also explained to him the feedback that I have gotten from acquaintances here that one of the reasons they are picking other hotels has in part to do with the breakfast offering, for battle weary travellers that stay in hotels as much as I do, the breakfast that is available in the morning if often the deal breaker.

Also a correction on my part, the hotel staff that was in the room cleaning up, they did speak to my wife before they left, I somehow missed the conversation and after clarfying with my wife today, I want to make it clear that the staff just did not just leave.

While time will tell if the Hilton Hawaiian Village will rectify all of these issues, I am convinced that they do understand  my concerns and we will defnitley go back and stay at the Hotel again in the future.

I began working on the Cochrane Family blog again tonight after a very long time of not doing anything with it. Having a bit of a hard time finding a theme for it but it will only take me a little while to get something going. I will be adding a huge number of pictures as well. I feel pretty guilty for not doing anything with the site in over yikes 5 years.

Todd…

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