Advantages: Central location, friendly staff.
Disadvantages: Not as luxurious as some

...A very pleasant hotel in a great location in one of the best cities on earth. We booked into this hotel for two nights on disembarking from our honeymoon cruise. Although we had already seen lots of places and sights during our cruise the Ala helped make us feel like we were on a new holiday from our water taxi arrival to the moment we departed. Location and access. The Ala is located in San Marco about 10 minutes walk from St Mark's Square. It is also 5 minutes to the Ponte Accademia and about 20 to the Rialto. It will obviously take longer if you stop and admire the sights around every corner. There is a waterbus stop about 5 minutes away and a Traghetti 100 yards away. Traghetti are gondolas which act as ferries from one side of the Grand Canal to the other for about 2 euros each. We were taken by water taxi transfer to and from... Read review

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Advantages: Variety of Shops & Restaurants, Beautiful Setting
Disadvantages: None

...I love the Ala Moana Center in Honolulu - I have visited it twice now on both of my visits to the Hawaiian Islands. It is a large shopping centre, part of which is in the open air. It is lovely to walk around, browsing in the shops and feeling a nice cool breeze as you do so. There is a wide variety of shops, from department stores to supermarkets to clothing stores and bookshops to small, speciality stores selling gifts, cosmetics, etc. The locals tend to shop there, so it is not full of tacky tourist shops or shops with rip-off prices (as tends to be the case in much of Waikiki). There is a also a wide range of places to eat. My favourite place is the food court, where you have a wide variety of choices from traditional Hawaiian to contemporary American to Chinese. All of the food in the food court is very reasonably... Read review

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Advantages: Erik Rutan's guitars and Howard Davis' drums are mostly quite good.
Disadvantages: Weak.

...Alas, here we have another death metal guitarist setting up a side project to extend his repertoire, when he should have stuck to his day job. And being guitarist for Hate Eternal, after spending considerable time with Morbid Angel, is pretty cool as far as day jobs go. Alas is Erik Rutan's one-off (so far) operatic progressive metal project, which essentially means slowed-down melodic death metal riffs over stilted drums, with a shrieking woman placed on top. These projects can sometimes work very well, as was the case for Cynic spin-off Aghora, but here it falls rather flat, and becomes increasingly tedious as the album plods along. Rutan's riffs and solos demonstrate his obvious talent, but all sound like completely generic melodeath played at an insultingly pedestrian pace, leaving Howard Davis (of Lover of Sin) to provide some... Read review

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