No Guys Allowed....

On a flight to Morocco, I read in Newsweek that some prominent hotels are wooing female customers with guest rooms exclusive with ladies. Quoting a top exec of a UK hotel, the article said that many hotels are realizing that 50% of business travellers are female and they hope to cater to this trend. Exclusive female guestrooms will have features that appeal to the lady traveller, such as feminine interior decorations, pink couches and other amenities. Also to come in the future, entire wings of hotels and resorts will be made exclusive to the female traveller. One hotel manager maintains that this is not discrimination.

Yeah right! That means that the next time I travel to a hotel, I will have half the chance of getting a room because the other half is reserved for the ladies, whether they turn up or not. I certainly will object to staying in a room with complimentary sanitary napkins in the drawers and pink fluffy pillows on the bed. Worse, I will be totally barred from an exclusive female wing of a hotel.

Seriously, I have never even considered that guestrooms are unfriendly to womankind. Aren't they neutral? Moreover, good hotels tend to be flexible to their customers' needs and give them almost what they want. Other than class and status, since when is gender an issue?

Without a doubt, this is certainly a marketing gimmick to pander to the rising spending power of women at the expense of men. Indeed, rise in women consumerism is bit by bit eroding the notion of men as the stronger sex. I'm not arguing that men should be the dominant gender but stating that this notion is sometimes far from the reality...We can be the weaker sex at some point as well, ladies...