tourism | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Touring San Francisco’s cold war missile base

A tour of San Francisco’s restored Nike Base is a good opportunity to remember the fear and paranoia of the Cold War

One of the longest running, and expensive, programs of the Cold War was the Nike missile program. Designed to protect US from Soviet bombers, the missiles were based at 280 sites and guarded cities and military installations.

Today the program is long since abandoned, a victim of changing technology and the 1972 SALT agreements between the then Soviet Union and US with the only base remaining in a working condition is SF-88 in what’s now the Golden Gate Park just North of San Francisco.

SF-88 itself was abandoned and over the last 15 years, volunteers have been rebuilding the site to roughly how it looked in the early 1960s at the peak of the Cold War.

The missiles themselves were only shortrange devices. The first version, the Ajax, only had a range of 25 miles and carried a conventional high explosive payload while the later model, the Hercules, could travel forty miles and could carry either conventional or nuclear warheads.

Each Nike base had three main components based at least a thousand yards apart; the actual launch site, the Integrated Fire Control room (IFC) that controlled the systems and administrative quarters. The reason for the thousand yard spacing was to minimise the damage from the launch of the rockets and to give the radar systems adequate range to track the weapons.

The missiles themselves were controlled by computer. Once fired they were controlled by the computers in the IFC, should the crew decide to abort the attack the only choices they had were to explode it prematurely or disarm it so it flew off into the ocean.

With the advent of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) and submarine launched weapons the Nike systems became redundant, an experimental anti-missile system – the Nike-X – was tested but as the scale of the Soviet arsenal became apparent it became clear the system would be hopelessly inadequate to combat the hailstorm of death a true nuclear war would unleash.

By 1974 most the system, including SF-88 was decommissioned although a small number of bases remained in operation for coastal defences for a few years afterwards. Today most are disappearing at the land is taken over for property development and other uses.

The volunteers who’ve restored SF-88 have done a wonderful job bringing a facility back to life – the missile hangers had six feet of water in them before the work started and on weekends between 12.30 and 3.30pm they’ll show you around the facility and bring one of the missiles to the surface firing position.

Fort Baker’s SF-88 Nike Base is an easy drive across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, on weekend the Muni runs the hourly 76-X service from the Transbay Terminal. Admission to the SF-88 base is free but donations are gratefully accepted.

If for nothing else, a visit to the Nike Missile Base is worthwhile just to remember how close the world was to destruction in the paranoid days of the Cold War.

Looking beyond the bro culture

The mapping of Nairobi’s Matatu minibus network and AirBnB’s Cuban ambitions show how apps could change the developing world

It’s not unfair to call many of the apps disrupting today’s industries as being the result of ‘first world problems’.

Uber was born out of founders Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick difficulty in hailing Parisian cabs while AirBnB came from Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky’s struggles with San Francisco rents.

Now as smartphones and mobile internet starts to become available to those in less wealthy parts of the world, we’re seeing how these concepts can be applied to problems more widespread.

A good example of this is the project to map Nairobi’s matatu minibus network where researchers used smartphones to create a picture of the city’s seemingly chaotic system of privately owned vehicles.

With some modifications, the data can be fed into Google’s transit map format that allows the routes to found on Google Maps.

The next logical step for this is for entrepreneurs, possibly even Uber, to entice matatu operators to use Uber like apps to track the location of minibuses and give passengers better payment options. It’s quite possible we’re seeing the start of an evolution into a new type of transit network using independent, privately owned vehicles bound together by an app based platform offering city wide public transport.

Similarly, in Cuba the room sharing service AirBnB is seeing the country’s informal private accommodation market as being an opportunity not only to expand its market but to help the country deal with the massive influx of US tourists now relations with the two countries have been normalised.

While the disruption to established markets from these new services has been huge, it may be the biggest effects are in developing countries where the economy and governments have reached the stage of development where powerful regulators work with incumbents to stymie competition.

In which case, today’s developing nations will see very different structures in their industries to those in the developed west that were built around 19th and 20th century technologies.

Image “A matatu” by Jociku – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Commons –

Travel Review – Kenmore Residence Club, San Francisco

The Kenmore Residence Club is a bargain for a San Francisco hotel, just don’t be expecting a six star experience.

San Francisco is an expensive city to stay, so a place at $80 a night that includes breakfast and dinner is bargain that can’t be ignored.

The Kenmore Residence Club is a slightly run down Victorian building in the Pacific Heights neighbourhood, just over a mile from San Francisco’s Union Square.

Given the price and location, it would be unfair to judge the place on its looks. Its 65 rooms vary from doubles with ensuites for $140 a night to singles with shared bathrooms for $80.

The singles with shared baths are surprisingly large rooms with a double sized bed and a walk in wardrobe. Also included in the room are a fridge, wash basin and flat screen TV. Sheets are changed twice a week along with the included hand and bath towels.

WiFi included

As almost always with cheaper hotels and hostels, Wi-Fi is included in the room rate and is surprisingly good throughout the building. In the room I stayed in, 308, the internet access was sufficient to work with and stream radio although Skype required sitting in one of the hallway sofas.

In other rooms patchy Wi-Fi may also be a problem as many of the other guests – which seemed to be mainly Japanese and German backpackers – were working on laptops in the hallway sofas.

Working in the room was fine with a basic desk, a not uncomfortable chair and plenty of power points. The view of the opposite peeling paint on the opposite wall meant there was little to distract an attention deficient worker.

Shared Facilities

Those German and Japanese tourists mean the two shared bathrooms on each floor are quite clean – apart from one unfortunate morning where someone had been sick. This wasn’t such a problem as it was always possible to find a vacant room. Soap dispensers are in the bathrooms but for showers it’s probably best to buy your own.

On the ground floor the dining room seats around forty people for breakfast between 7am and 9am and dinner, Monday to Saturday, between 5.30 and 7. If you’re in San Francisco for sightseeing or business, it’s hard to get back in time for dinner so don’t budget on eating too many evening meals there.

The meals themselves are adequate with a self service salad or breakfast bar and a cooked option. The dinners were fairly stodgy while the eggs or pancakes are fine at breakfast but the bacon and sausages are forgettable. I found myself eating just fried and scrambled eggs with toast and loading up with salad and fruit.

If you don’t eat in the hotel, it’s only two blocks away from Japantown where there’s no shortage of good and cheap ramen, sushi and other Japanese restaurants. There’s also a Whole Foods and Walgreens within three blocks if you want to make your own meal.

Getting there

Should you want to get down to the touristy parts of San Francisco, the 38 Muni bus down Geary Street is the quickest and most reliable way to Union Square and the Ferry Building. Two blocks away on Van Ness, the 18 will take you to Fisherman’s Wharf and on weekends the 76X goes to the Golden Gate Bridge and Marin Headlands.

Coming back from Union Square, the number 2 and 3 buses stop almost outside the hotel but are far less frequent or reliable than the Geary services. If you need a Clipper Card or Muni Passport the Walgreens a block away on the corner of Post and Gough street is the place to visit.

The neighbourhood itself is quite safe although south of the Cathedral and into the Hayes Valley things get somewhat less salubrious and walking around that part of SF at night is not recommended by the locals. A stroll back from Union Square or the Embarcadero though isn’t unpleasant.

Doing your laundry

Another benefit with the Kempton is the coin operated laundry in the basement. If you’ve been travelling for a while – I’d spent the previous week in San Jose – being able to wash your clothes is a godsend, laundry powder and change is available at reception and you’ll need lots of quarters for the driers.

Staff at the hotel seem to be mainly made up of long term residents who are working to defray their rent, this means they are a quirky mixed bag of characters. Some are a bit gruff while others are delightfully helpful, again it’s not the Marriott Marquis and the rates reflect that.

There are some downsides to the Kempton, the rooms aren’t particularly quiet – this is something to be expected at cheaper hotels and there are no strong boxes or other security beyond the door locks in the room. While the place seemed safe, nervous travellers may want to consider their storage of passports and valuables.

On balance, The Kenmore is a bargain in one of America’s most expensive cities. If you’re prepared to deal with the quirks and stay a little bit out of the San Francisco tourist spots then the price is unbeatable.

Daily links – Chinese tourists, mars landers, Zappos management

Links of the day include how jaywalking became a crime, where Chinese tourists go and a lost Mars lander found on Mars.

Where do Chinese tourist like to travel to? One of today’s links looks at where the modern PRC tourist likes to go. Other links include how jaywalking became a crime, Samsung’s attack on the low end Indian smartphone and how disguised Starbucks may be popping up in your suburb.

Kicking off today’s links is an examination of how Zappos’ CEO and founder Tony Hsieh is carrying out a daring experiment on the management structures of his company.

Zappos’ strange management experiment

No-one can accuse Zappos’ founder Tony Hsieh of thinking inside the box, his experiment with new form of management called holacracy is another example of how he tries to do things differently. Whether it will be successful or not remains to be seen.

How Jaywalking became a crime

Vox tells of how cars took over our cities’ streets during the early Twentieth Century. It’s an interesting description of the political, social and economic forces at work as the effects of the automobile started to be felt by our communities.

Lost spacecraft found on Mars

“It was a heroic failure.” Britain’s Beagle space mission to Mars ended in mystery when the lander vanished just before Christmas 2002. Now it’s been found. I find this story quite touching.

Your local cafe might be a stealth Starbucks

Like McDonalds, Starbucks is facing structural changes in its market. One of the ways both companies are responding by launching experimental new stores. Some of which might be near you without you knowing.

Samsung launches a sub $100 Tizen phone in India

Just as the car changed the Twentieth Century the smartphone may well be one of the critical technologies that shapes this era. Cheap phones in emerging markets are the equivalent of the Ford Model T a hundred years ago.

Samsung’s move is a response to the Chinese manufacturers who are dominating that market. That Samsung is using their own Tizen operating system rather than Android which most of the Chinese companies use is something worth watching.

Where are Chinese tourists going

As Chinese manufacturers look to emerging markets as their economic future, the country’s tourists are exploring the world. This article laments how those PRC travellers are ignoring London and the UK but also has some interesting observations about the destinations they prefer.

Links of the day – Tesla in Australia

Chinese tourists and Mao’s influence on the US Marines are today’s links

Chinese tourism and Mao’s influence on the US Marines are today’s links along with Tesla’s slow start in Australia.

Tesla rolls out in Australia

As part of Tesla’s Australian launch of its electric vehicles, the company has announced a chain of charging stations along the country’s East Coast, unfortunately not everyone is pleased to see them.

Chinese tourists look to Japan and the US

Japan and the US are the most sought after destinations for Chinese tourists reports the Wall Street Journal. Both countries have relaxed travel restrictions for China nationals in the last year and now they are reaping the benefits, particularly Japan which is only a few hours flight from Shanghai and Beijing.

Interestingly, New Zealand and Australia are also big improvers on the list with them coming in third and fourth on the list.

The US Marines’ Maoist connection

A curious article on Medium describes the origin of the term ‘gung-ho’ and how it was introduced to the US Marines through a Mao sympathising American General. “He may be red, but he’s not yellow” is how his contemporaries described Brigadier General Evans Carlson.

Cargo cults and Chinese casinos

China’s economy could be affecting casinos, which is bad news for Macau and Australia

A few days ago this site covered Patrick Chovanec’s views on the changes the world faces as China moves from an export focused economy to one that relies more on domestic consumption.

Chovanec highlighted that some industries will be winners — retailers for instance — while others such as property developers and exporting manufacturers will be losers.

It seems we can add casinos to that list of losers; the big gamblers aren’t spending money as their property collateral falls and the government tightens up on corruption.

As Quartz reports, Macau’s casinos have encountered their second consecutive quarter of revenue falls and gambling stocks are falling.

That’s bad news for Macau’s economy but it’s also not good for those who’ve hitched their fortunes to Chinese gamblers — Steve Wynn and James Packer are two people immediately spring to mind.

In the case of James Packer this is also bad news for the Australian economy as Packer’s Aussie casinos are increasingly focused on attracting Chinese ‘whales’.

For Sydney and the state of New South Wales, this is particularly bad news as the government gifted a prime site of land to build a new casino that was going to be the mainstay of the city’s tourism industry.

Not that Sydney is alone in its cargo cult like hope that building a casino will attract Chinese. In Northern Queensland, the struggling city of Cairns is pinning the future of its tourism industry on a massive complex in a flood mangrove swamp.

Should that project collapse it will be another example of the folly in believing Australia could ride on the back of a booming China for decades and staking everything on that belief.

In the 21st Century, business is more than just building a shiny object and hoping rich Chinese will come.

Coming to the end of the 747 era

With the retirement of the last 747’s an important chapter of the Twentieth Century closes. What follows will define the shape of today’s tourist and business travel industry.

The 747 Jumbo jet defined an era of international travel and now it’s coming to an end.

Whether the 747 was the first true jumbo jet – the 747-400 certainty wasn’t – is a question for debate; for my money the DC-10 was the original ‘heavy’. But really it doesn’t matter as the Boeing aircraft defined the late Twentieth Century model of global tourism.

The era of the heavy wide bodied jet planes chained international travel and spawned the modern tourist industry.

With the retirement of the last 747’s an important chapter of the Twentieth Century closes. What follows will define the shape of today’s tourist and business travel industry.

Solomon Lew and Australia’s perfect storm

Australia’s retail leaders are helpless in the face of change they don’t understand, the rest of the nation faces the same problem.

One of Australia’s leading retailers, Solomon Lew, joined the conga line of business whiners this week with complaints that the recently departed Labor government had been bad for his industry.

Yesterday I posted an interview with Susan Olivier of Dassault Systemes about how the retail and fashion industries – Solomon Lew’s businesses – are being radically changed by technology and changing consumer behaviour.

Lew, along with most Australian retailers, has completely missed these changes and instead remained focused on their 1980s model of screwing down suppliers while charging customers high prices for poor goods and substandard service.

Now that 1980s business model has come to an end Lew and his other retailers like David Jones’ Paul Zahra, Myer’s Bernie Brookes and, most vocal of all, Gerry Harvey bleat about government taxes, high labour rates and almost anything else apart from the obvious factors they can fix themselves.

Bigger storms ahead

Along with the two factors Olivier identified, there’s two much bigger factors threatening Australian retail – the tapping out of the credit boom and the aging population.

The aging population is simple, consumer tastes are changing as the population ages and the need for conspicuous consumption and the latest fashions tapers off as one gets older. The demographic boom of the late Twentieth Century is over.

More immediate though is the tapping out of the credit boom, since the Global Financial Crisis Australians have swung around to be net savers which immediately pulls a large chunk out of the discretionary consumer spending pie which had kept the retail industry ticking along through the 1980s and 90s.

Another aspect is the end of the home ATM – while Australian Exceptionalists deny this happened down under, it certainly did as banks sought to ‘liberate’ the equity householder had locked in their properties. This too fuelled the credit boom.

Perversely we may be seeing the home ATM receiving a reprieve as Australian property prices accelerate from their already bubble-like levels, however that short term sugar hit for retailers and the economy is only creating bigger problems for the country’s merchants.

Funding an uncompetitive economy

Contrary to the bleating of Australian retailers, the biggest problem facing the sector is the nation’s high rents and property prices.

For consumers, those huge rents and huge mortgages take money that could otherwise be buying more consumer goods, at the same time retailers are being slugged by some of the highest rents in the world, pushing up their costs and reducing competitiveness.

That lack of competitiveness is affecting all parts of the Australian economy, particularly tourism, and the retail industry isn’t immune to those forces.

Anyone who visits an Australian eating establishment will have experienced this, personally I had another experience last night at a pub that charged $4 (3.70 US) for a soda water.

This wasn’t a trendy downtown bar but a pub in a lower middle class suburb with two overworked and under trained young bar staff. During the three hours there, our table of six was cleared once.

Swiss prices coupled with service that would be barely acceptable in a 1970s outback Queensland roadhouse is not the formula for a successful economy.

The business challenge

Which brings us back to Solomon Lew’s whinge about the government, Sol handily overlooks the previous government’s stimulus packages which kept the nation out of recession and put money straight into his and other retailers’ pockets.

There’s a lesson there for the Australian Labor Party that the tweedle-dum, tweedle-dumber strategy of offering near identical corporate and middle class welfare policies to the Liberal Party is not going to win you friends with the nation’s business sector and its entitled leaders.

For the incoming Liberal government, it is faced with the challenge of making Australia a competitive, high-cost economy along the lines of Japan, Switzerland or Germany.

It’s hard to be optimistic about the Abbott government meeting this challenge given the bulk of its ministers are holdovers from the previous Howard Liberal government that was largely responsible for Australia flunking the transition to being a high cost economy along with institutionalising a middle class welfare culture into Australian society.

Even if Abbott does genuinely attempt to address Australia’s lack of competitiveness, he can be sure he will get absolutely no help from the whingeing captains of the nation’s industries, as Solomon Lew has shown.

While Solomon Lew and the Australian managerial class struggle with their perfect storms of economic, demographic and technological change, the nation also faces those headwinds.

Hopefully for Australia there are capable leaders who can navigate those storm waiting to take the helm.

A quick Christmas checklist for hospitality businesses

What should cafes, restaurants and hotels do to be found by holiday makers and tourists?

For listeners of my regular spot on ABC Riverland, here’s a quick checklist for regional business owners to make sure their online presence is ready for the Christmas holidays.

Prospective customers are using the web to find businesses and attractions, so taking advantage of the free listing services by the major search engines and directories is the first step.

Google Plus Local

The search engine giant’s local service gives a free business listing that feeds into their results and those of many GPS devices and social media services.

Fill in as many fields as possible, making sure you don’t forget opening hours and payment methods you accept.

You can also upload photos and menus to your Google Local listing, all of these will help you come up higher in the search engine results.

True Local

News Limited’s True Local offers a similar service to Google and this also feeds into various services along with the local news sites run by the newspaper chain.

Again, fill in as many fields as possible and make sure all your essential business details are listed.

Sensis

While the Yellow and White Pages may be dying, a free listing with their site will help come up on the various Telstra sites and companies that partner with them.

Review sites

Eatability, Yelp and Tripadvisor are all popular sites and applications used by customers to research accommodation and venues. You need to grab your listing and check what previous customers have said about you.

Social media

Along with having your own listing on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and possibly sites like Pinterest; you should be doing regular searches to check what people are saying about you and your district.

One of the great things about social media is it’s a great market intelligence tool. For instance if there’s lots of people coming to your town to go fishing and there’s nobody catering for them, then this is an opportunity. Google Alerts can help you with this.

Your own website

Most important of all is your own website. Check that it works on smartphones and tablet computers, if necessary borrow a friend’s Android or Apple device and see what your site looks like on it.

When you review this with your web developer also check your keywords are working and make sure yourmeta-tagsall reflect what you have to offer your customers.

The Christmas-New Year rush is too important a period for hospitality business to miss out on customers. A few small thing might get you the visitors who might have kept on driving to the next town.

Travel review: Jupiter’s Hotel and Casino, Gold Coast

The Gold Coast’s Jupiter’s Hotel and Casino is a property desperately in need of a refurbishment.

Jupiter’s was built in the late 1980s as part of Australia’s initial casino mania. Today it’s looking its age despite several refurbishments in recent years.

Apart from the gambling room, the complex’s main attraction is its proximity to the Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre.

Location

Jupiter’s Hotel and Casino is located centrally on the Gold Coast in Broadbeach, around 4km South of Surfers Paradise and 20km North of the Airport, right next to the Pacific Fair shopping mall.

The Casino sits on its own island some 500m away from the beach. The Gold Coast Convention Centre is a 200m walk from the hotel across an open air walkbridge.

Most of the time that walk will be fine but be prepared to get soaked in wet weather.

There is also a cheesy and largely pointless monorail that runs to the shopping complex across the highway. The $3 fare is reportedly waived for hotel guests but check at reception first.

Check-in

The front desk staff are friendly and helpful. There was no problem with checking in two hours before the official check-in time.

Asking reception for some fresh milk for the tea making facilities was no problem.

Rooms

While it’s claimed there have been ongoing refurbishments since 2008, the rooms are dated and tired, despite a relatively recent paint job.

Beds are comfortable and the blackout blinds do a good job of plunging the room into darkness and keeping the early morning or late evening sun out of the room on a hot day.

The bathroom, mini-bar and tea making facilities are basic but adequate. Each room has a digital combination safe as well as ironing equipment.

One aspect of the 1980s legacy is the scarcity of power points with only one double power outlet next to the fixed desk unit. Luckily there are nearby shopping centres to buy a powerboard if you can’t borrow one from reception.

Rooms have wireless and wired Internet available for a fee, although it may waived for convention guests. Surfing and downloads are extremely quick.

Amenities in the room are satisfactory with the standard range of free to air and cable TV stations including CNN, Bloomberg Asia and Sky.

Unfortunately the room doesn’t have dressing gowns and it’s little touches like that which let the hotel down.

Fitness Facilites

the Gym is well equipped with the usual range of weights, rowing and walking machines and open from 5.30am on weekdays.

It’s open to the public and could get crowded at busy times. The weekend times are fairly limited with Sunday being a stingy 8am to 4pm, Saturday’s are 7 to 5.

If you want a swim, there’s a large, warm pool next door to the gym and lap swimmers can get a 25m stretch if it isn’t busy. The pool area is open from 6am to 9pm and also has two spa baths.

Overall impressions

Jupiter’s desperately needs an investor to spruce the place up. The public areas are looking run down with chipped tiles and scuffed walls. Generally there’s a faded 1980s vibe about the place.

That 1980s feel also comes from the patrons, a midweek stay at Jupiter’s will find you sharing with a lot of grumpy seniors who are presumably playing the pokies (slot) and games in the casino.

In many respects Jupiter’s reflects much of what is wrong with Australian hospitality — a 1980s property that hasn’t had the investment to compete in the 21st Century catering for a declining, low value segment of the marketplace.

Overall the hotel is adequate but there are better deals to be had on the Gold Coast.

If you’re attending a conference at the Gold Coast Conference Centre then it may be worth checking out rooms at the nearby Sofitel or the many serviced apartments in the Broadbeach area.

Paul stayed at Jupiter’s Hotel and Casino courtesy of Microsoft when attending the 2012 Australian TechEd conference.