Hell Hotel

"Entrance" Taken with my cell phone.

Hell Hotel
Literally. I spend 2 nights at work there last week.

In SAS we - the pilots and CA - earlier have been so lucky as to get rather nice stops in interesting cities all over Europe. We had them often, they were reasonably long and we got to explore the cities. In some cities we had airport hotels which we used when we had short layovers (less than 14 hours).This to cut down on the transportation time.

Since 9-11 the story has been quite different. The stops have been dramatically cut. Understandable. We have to save money.
The pilot union agreed, among lots of other things, to extend the limit for short layovers to 16 hours. Not good, but understandable.
Since then things have gotten worse and even more worse. The “management” (I want to add mis-“) seems to have gotten it in for us. Maybe they want us to quit voluntarily instead of having to fire us? Just one of many things; since we now have agreed to work almost indefinitely every day, they have started to schedule us with a two/three hour break before we fly the last leg of the day. This to get us below the 16 hour stop limit so that we have to stay at a remote hotel somewhere in no mans land. Quite frustrating. You work 12-14 hour days and then you are stuck at an industrial area for the next 16 hours. Then a new long day at work.

Well, back to Hell Hotel.
In Trondheim, Norway, we have been lucky with the airport hotel. Only a 5 minute drive away from the airport there is a small community named Stjordal. It is a typically nice little Norwegian town, with a mall, theatre and several restaurants. We had it ok there. Management probably discovered that we enjoyed this layover, so now they have found us a new hotel a four minute drive in the opposite direction - in the middle of nowhere. It is to top it all named Hell Hotel. I guess management threw a party among themselves after doing this. It all reminds me of the Dilbert comic strips where this little “devil dog” does its worst to make life a living hell for the employees.