Pod interview + New Hotels Guide (my new website!)

A few days ago I got podcast interviewed by Viggo Cavling.

The interview in Swedish. If you listen to it you have to understand that Viggo pulls out the tape recorder the same second he steps through the door at Knackeriet, and begins firing off questions like crazy. I get somewhat surprised and Viggo is quite entertaining with his bare appearance which makes hard for me not to giggle my way through the interview for the first ten minutes.

The we cool down a bit and talk about Tripbirds (my old startup), Boutiquehotel.me (the site I have with Jonatan) and my newly launched site Ping-pong-hotels.

At the end of the interview I have a surprise for Viggo: That I have built a NEW website just for HIM (and people like him!). It's called New Hotels Guide!

New Hotels Guide 

The background is that Viggo wrote in an opinion piece recently that he does not like hotels where hundreds (or thousands!) of people have already slept in the bed and used the toilet. So my new website lets people find newly opened hotels in London, Paris, New York, Berlin and many other cities around the world. :)

Viggo also mentions that he is planning a trip to Lisbon and that what he really is after is "wow hotels" or things like really hand-picked hotel recommendations.

You can listen to the podcast with Viggo Cavling on apple podcasts or acast.

And check out New Hotels Guide too, and let me know what you think. Please note that I can not promise a personal hotel website for each and every journalist - but if you ping me I will do my best!! 😊

Ping pong hotels!

Which is the world's most popular sport?

This could come as a surprise to some people but it might actually be table tennis.

According to credible sources, table tennis has more active players than soccer.

There are more than 300 million active table tennis players in the world, compared to about 265 million soccer players. These numbers are referring to people who play table tennis every week for at least 30 minutes. Official numbers are quite hard to find, but it seems that all in all there are a total of 900 million table tennis players worldwide.

Based on these numbers, I thought it was strange that there was no website for people who want to play table tennis while on vacation.

Happy people playing ping pong on vacation. 

If 265 million people play table tennis every week, wouldn't at least some of them want to play table tennis while on vacation, as well? Or when travelling abroad, for work? Table tennis could also be the world's most social sport, a great way to meet new people. A a matter of fact, many of you readers will have played table tennis on you past vacations, as a way to meet new people.

So in order to help all you ping-pong players out there, I have created the world first ping pong hotel website! Welcome to ping-pong-hotels.com

Here you can find the best ping pong hotels in many thousand cities worldwide. The site is updated every week, with new ping pong hotels and pictures of their table tennis facilities.

The site uses AI (=artificial intelligence) in the form of image recognition to find real pictures of table tennis facilities at the hotels. Many hotels have their ping pong tables tucked away in the basements. I want to encourage hotels to put the ping pong tables in their "front and center" social areas, and take nice pictures of them. Like these hotels in Berlin, Barcelona, Paris and Los Angeles. The image recognition is not always perfect, but it will get better over time. But note that if ping-pong-hotels.com says that a hotel has table tennis facilities then this is 100% verified.

Currently, ping-pong-hotels.com lists more than 85.000 hotels with verified table tennis facilities. Do you know which countries have the most table tennis hotels? Here is the top ten list, which might surprise you a little. (I thought Germany would top the list, but I was wrong.)

Italy - 10510 table tennis hotels

France - 8371 table tennis hotels

Spain - 5885 table tennis hotels

Austria - 5041 table tennis hotels

United States - 4422 table tennis hotels

Germany - 4408 table tennis hotels

Russia - 3395 table tennis hotels

Brazil - 3246 table tennis hotels

Hungary - 2473 table tennis hotels

Poland - 2419 table tennis hotels

If you need more info, send an email to ted + @ + tedvalentin.com! 

Small Luxury Hotels

With the help of a few friends that have helped with the curation, I have now created a wonderful small website for finding the world's best Small Luxury Hotels. I'm really happy with the result. This is the website that I will use next time I am going on a city break.

The site finds great hotels that are usually within the span of 20-80 rooms. But some exceptions, with even smaller or larger hotels, are OK!

I do not travel that much myself, but places I would love to visit - and that have fantastic hotels - are Lisbon, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Paris. I would also love to walk around Venice some day with my daughter when there are not that many tourists around (but I have heard that it is one of the places that are having some real problems with mass tourism).