Letters to the Editor

Tripadvisor is now another booking engine. Hotels and restaurants are asked to pay not for bookings but for their business listings. You want to be on the first page just pay them and you will be there, what appears first when you enter their page is put your dates and they will get you the best price, hotels that pay them then appear on the “just for you” not by customer review ratings as before.

The only way to get a star rating is to work with Expedia, I chose not to work with every Tom , Dick and Harry booking engine so if anyone looks for rooms on my site on Tripadvisor it states no rooms available which tells the guest I am full when I am not.

You do not have to have eaten or stayed in a hotel or restaurant to write a review on Tripadvisor so the whole site is now meaningless.

Whereas serious and professional booking engines like Booking.com now have reviews and to write a review you have to have booked your stay with them, so you know the review is real good or bad.

Once the big corporations take over then it just becomes about profit and greed Which is sad and as I have said Tripadvisor was a great idea.

Adrian Bertorelli
Can Furios Hotel

Grenfell Tower
Dear Sir,
Re Revd. David Walker’s article about the Grenfell Tower inferno, interesting though it was, it brought us no nearer to solving the deep mystery surrounding this terrible tragedy.

As I understand it from the police, the politicians and the fire brigade as told us on TV, the fire began in the deep freeze section of a resident’s fridge. I have never heard of deep freeze section of a fridge catching fire, and neither have any of my friends. And even if true and it did catch fire, providing the door of the refrigerator was closed, the fire, once having consumed all the oxygen inside the fridge, would have put itself out. So presumably the fire had to have been caused – or even been brought about – by an explosion inside the fridge powerful enough to blow the door off. This has never been explained.

Secondly, the police, the fire brigade and the politicians are as one in saying that the fire brigade was on the scene within ten minutes of the fire being seen blazing away in the kitchen of the resident’s flat. Yet in that ten short minutes before the fire brigade arrived, the entire building had been engulfed in flame? An entire building going up in ten minutes? This is possible if the building was struck by some sort of bomb – or if the entire floor had been doused with petrol. Or, maybe if there had been a wild gale blowing the flames hither and thither. But to engulf twenty floors in just ten minutes is asking one to accept the almost impossible.

Then there is the question of responsibility and legal damages owed to the residents. We now know that high-rise apartment blocks have been built in total defiance of the law. Where does the buck stop for this? Does it stop with those councils who licence the erection of these high rise apartment blocks? Or are the architects and constructional engineers liable? Further, in view of the news on TV that the minister responsible turned a blind eye to all the reports that Grenfell Tower was a fire hazard when it was first being built, is he/she personally responsible or is it the government at the time?

At present the only people suffering from this monstrous piece of almost unbelievable inefficiency are the poor residents themselves. They have lost their homes, their belongings, the old and sick are being forced to live in third world circumstances: pets have to be given away, children are suffering etc.
So who is liable before the law? And how many millions of pounds should the residents of Grenfell Tower and other and the other displaced residents sue for?

This is an unsolved mystery. I hope that some of our better investigative newspaper reporters will fully expose those responsible for this tragic and disgraceful state of affairs.

Sincerely,
David Lee