It's incredible - a tiny bar that has no nameplate, that is hidden behind a door bearing the sign "no admittance" and holding only 25 people in an unfashionable district of Kuala Lumpur's city centre is famous. It's such a cool, almost magical, place that it's the kind of place you keep for special occasions. It's regularly featured in "Best Bars" in all kinds of magazines and, even, seat-back glossies in airlines.
Hotels.Com already allows cancellation of bookings without penalty in many of the properties it advertises. But the unprecedented range of restrictions being placed on travellers, often at short notice, means that contracts are, to all intents and purposes, being frustrated by operation of law. It's not, in strict terms, force majeur although many are calling it that or, even, an Act of God. No, it's not that either.
Hotels.com has produced an excellent analysis of exactly what the US blockade of travellers from some parts of the EU means. The notice addresses many of the misconceptions and false arguments that are popular on much social media.
As more and more photos emerge of near empty restaurants and entertainment outlets, it's clear that governments are going to have to do something to help, even if it causes some political, even religious, dissatisfaction.
When former policewoman and domestic violence sufferer Carolyn Kerr decided to take over an abandoned shack-like building formerly used as a butchers' shop, she did the thing that would remind her how far she'd come and named it "The Battered Wife." That's upset one of Australia's increasingly numerous and increasingly forceful self-appointed guardians of their own standpoint who began a brutal campaign against Kerr and her tiny business.
Questions over the future of takeaway food apps and delivery services are raised by the second case of a restaurateur being prosecuted following the death of a customer after an extreme allergic reaction.
The advent of services such as Airbnb has , in some parts of the world, created an interesting effect: hotels are seeing that groups would often prefer to rent serviced apartments via websites than use several hotel rooms. This has had a cooling effect on rates at the same time as making hotels improve their service levels or it has started a race to the bottom where room-only rates are coupled with reducing quality of service. That's competition but, just as Uber has been lambasted for encouraging unregulated drivers to compete with highly regulated drivers, so Airbnb, etc., are facilitating unregulated accommodation whereas hotels are subject to increasing levels of regulation.
