What if Your Personal Brand is Your P*ssy?

I've said it before and I'll say it again--I love Penelope Trunk. Admittedly, she gets a little nasty sometimes--and I don't mean nasty like dirty nasty, I mean nasty like mean nasty. If you ask me, girl needs some mood stabilizers, stat, but apparently her craziness is not only her charm but her dollar value--her investing model seems to be attract blog traffic by being outrageous.

One of her ongoing ways of being outrageous is talking about her, um, girl parts. Specifically the fact that she waxes her pubic hair. Her and every other girl under the age of 30, that is--or are younger girls now kicking it old school and leaving the pre-pubescent girl look to actual pre-pubescent girls? Anyway...she seems to get a lot of mileage out of using her pubic hair stories to shock readers, investors, her lawyer, etc.

At some point, though, isn't enough enough? Is it really that interesting, on an ongoing basis, to hear about the state of her hair-down-there--or lack thereof? Today she was at it again, on Twitter:

"Brazilian today. New person doing the waxing. I didn't request the wax woman I like best; seems too intimate to admit to having a favorite."

Past pubic tweets include "Living in WI makes me out of date: A NYC friend says "Do lasers, duh," when I tell her the waxer in WI leaves hairs where mouths should be" and "For 90 minutes I'm the productivity queen: 25 emails, 14 phone calls and one twitter. While I get waxed. Everything off. First time. Ouch."

Ok we get it--your pussy is bald. Now move on.

Encore Las Vegas

Rather than blogging about our experience at the Encore in Las Vegas, I'm just posting the email I sent in response to their "Hope you enjoyed your stay!" email.

I have to say that I was extremely disappointed during our whole stay at Encore. We are repeat guests at the Wynn Towers and have received outstanding customer service there. Encore was the total opposite. When we checked in on Friday, they made no mention of the pool being closed--we had to find out when we tried to go to the pool and were turned away. When we tried to go to the European pool we were told we should have been given a pool pass at the front desk and had to go wait another 45 minutes to get it. Then at the pool, even though the regular pool was closed, thereby making the European pool much more crowded, the pool staff refused to let guests use the "reserved" seating, even though it was ALL empty.

The hotel manager had promised to upgrade our room for the inconvenience but he didn't; when I called the hotel manager to ask why they were having to turn guests away from the European pool because there wasn't enough seating even though all the "reserved" seating was empty, she just connected me to the pool manager, who was unapologetic.

The whole stay underscored the fact that Encore is just a cheap Wynn look-alike that's all show and not at all about treating guests with respect or providing quality customer service. The reason we have been repeat guests at the Wynn is because they genuinely care about guests and if there is a problem, they quickly resolve it. Encore staff obviously have not been trained in providing quality customer service and it is grimly apparent that they have no idea how guests at a supposed 5-star hotel expect to be treated.

I'm sorry to say that we will not be returning to either the Wynn or Encore on future visits--which is a shame because up until now the Wynn was our favorite hotel.

I would also suggest that you make your staff aware that, given the ease with which people can share their stories about travel and their experiences with different hotel staff via social media, they give a bit more thought to the way they treat guests. Bad customer service is a lot more of a liability when one guest can now share a bad experience with millions of people via Twitter, Facebook and blogs.

Aside from the experience curing me forever of my obsession with the Wynn, we did have a great time with our friends and a fun time in general. The only problem is that, while I think I got slots out of my system for good, I was introduced to my new favorite experience: the European pool. European=topless. Now I never want to wear a top while sunbathing again. Think that would help or hurt our chances of getting into the pool we're on the waiting list for?