Financial & Travel Musings

At the moment I’m technically between jobs but it was only when Wendy pointed out that this means that I’m unemployed that I started thinking that perhaps I should be claiming unemployment benefit.

Of course, it’s not “unemployment benefit” anymore as we have job seekers in the UK rather than unemployed people and that’s an interesting change in categorisation when you think about it. To be labelled a “job seeker” is definitely more positive than to be labelled simply as “unemployed”, isn’t it?

That relabelling brought with it a lot of other changes. For instance, in the “unemployment office” you now find two separate groups of people that deal with you. First, there’s the people who handle the benefit payments who are basically the same group as have always been there and who are interested in seeing that you’ve made the appropriate social security payments to entitle you to the benefit. Separately from them are the employment people who are there to do what they can to help you back into work and who will prod you into getting up and looking for work if needbe. Formerlly the two were quite separate and in buildings separated by several miles so there wasn’t the sense that there is now of the payment being there just to help you along whilst you’re off looking for work.

One side-effect for me is that there’s what’s almost a trick question on the form: are you currently studying? I am in that I’m doing a child development course but seeing as it’s not a full-time one that means that I’m actually available for work which is what the question is really asking.

Full marks though for that relabelling and the reorganisation that happened almost behind the scenes. Although, in theory, I have a job waiting (sort-of), it has prompted me to have a look around anyway.

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The interesting thing these days that luxury hotel rooms aren’t always in what you’d traditionally think of as luxury hotels per se.

What’s been happening in recent years is that there’s a segment of the hotel industry that have realised that the vast majority of us don’t want to pay for the pandering that you get in a typical luxury class hotel. What we really would pay for is a hotel room that is luxurious in the sense of meeting all of our needs and quite often you find that the rooms in “luxury hotels” just don’t do that.

How come though? Since the majority of luxury hotels have been running for quite a while their rooms are sometimes lacking in the high techology that we’ve all started to take for granted in what would otherwise be quite basic hotels. For instance, you’d think that a luxury hotel would include free wifi with the room but often they’ve taken the view that they need to charge to recoup the cost of installing and running it.

So when you’re looking for luxury make sure that you’re looking for luxury and facilities in the places that you actually want it. For most of us that’s probably the room rather than the hotel in general.

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