Fairmont, a name you can trust

Touristy location

The Fairmont Heritage Place Hotel is located in an excellent spot, with direct access to Ghiradelli Square. Ghirardelli Square is great location for tourists and is close to Fisherman’s Wharf.

Incredible five stars hotel
This 5 stars hotel has magnificent rooms and very high standards. From the friendly staff, to design of the hotel and the comfort of the rooms, the Fairmont Heritage Place is a world class hotel. The exceptional high level of service by all the staff will make your stay pleasant and comfortable. The entire staff is extremely polite, accommodating, and very helpful. Ask for an upgraded room with views of the bay and Alcatraz, it is definitely a must! You can request the concierge to do your grocery shopping in advance (for example to get you a nice bottle of wine from the wine store down the street) or you can take advantage of their 500 DVDs collection on rainy evenings.

Guestrooms
Fairmont Heritage Place has some of the most luxurious hote rooms in San Francisco Hotel Reservations. Believe it or not, all the rooms in the Fairmont are the size of a real apartment, as they were originally built in a condominium like design. Ask for an upgrade and you will get a superb view on the San Francisco Bay and Alcatraz. Each room is equipped with a large flatscreen tv, mounted, and with a full surround sound system. The hotel also comes with incredibly comfortable bed, which will bring you in some of the best sleep you’ll ever experience.

Fine dining
The numerous restaurants in the building offer amazing fine dining. San Francisco Hotel Reservations highly recommend you to visit the local wine merchant, located within the complex, who offers wine testing sessions on a daily basis. Moreover, the 5 stars hotel itself offers cheese and wine sessions in late afternoon, complimentary from Fairmont Hotel. At Fairmont Heritage Place, gourmet continental breakfast is also complimentary to your booking. The breakfast includes fresh fruits, pastries, cereals, milk, coffee, a selection of gourmet tea, yogurts and bagels.

The surroundings
San Francisco Hotel Reservation highly recommends the Ghiradelli chocolate store, definitely a must go. For any chocolate lover, the Ghiradelli chocolate store is an eden. Plus free samples of their best chocolate are offered every day. Therefore make sure to pay a visit to the Ghiradelli chocolate store to buy some chocolate as gifts, treat yourself with a large chocolaty sundae or simply stop by for a free chocolate sample! If you have a sweet tooth, San Francisco Hotel Reservations advise you to make sure to also visit Kara’s Cupcakes, which are rich moist cakes that are not overly frosted. Cupcakes comes in several flavors, some of the favorites are the Coconut Meyer Lemon filled, Fleur de Sel and Carrot Cake. Finally, if you like wine, San Francisco Hotel Reservations recommends 360 Wine Celler. This wine celler is located a few feet from the Fairmont Heritage Place. You will find great wine products as well a cheese, to accompany your wine.

Craving for cupcakes? Visit Kara's Cupcakes a few minutes away from the Fairmont.

San Francisco Hotel Reservations wished you a great stay at Fairmont Heritage Place in San Francisco!

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Step 1 – If you’re looking for a room at a particular hotel during summer, the busiest season, book well in advance. The best time to visit San Francisco is winter, when many hotel prices are lower due to less demand.

Step 2 – Learn about San Francisco’s neighborhoods and their location. For example, Union Square is the most central neighborhood and has a lot of good hotels available, but it is not necessarily the most interesting area to stay, while Mission District is a young and lively neighborhood, but is more remote and has few decent hotels available. You may want to avoid Tenderloin, which is cheap and close to the civic center but can be dangerous, especially at night. More typical neighborhoods like North Beach or Haight are recommended. If you can afford a little luxury, I suggest renting a hotel room in Nob Hill.

Step 3 – San Francisco is a popular destination all year-around, so you might find its hotel rooms quite expensive, but you can still find good bargains if you make a thorough research. Don’t hesitate to call the hotels and ask questions. Most larger hotels, and many smaller hotels as well, have package deals, promotions, special discounts for elders, military, students, or corporations, and weekend discounts. For those travelling with their family, there are interesting deals on rooms with two beds or more available. If you’re travelling alone, there are some hotels, especially the more affordable ones, that charge lower rates for single San Francisco Hotel Reservations.

Step 4 – You can also further your research online. Look for more information about the chosen hotel on Google or Yahoo!. Check the official websites and read costumer reviews. Remember, though, that neither is always reliable: some official websites can try to suck you in with pretty pictures and make you regret your choice later on, and some costumers give bad reviews simply because they can’t be pleased. Don’t forget to check travel boards and forums, you’ll likely find answers to some of your questions. If not, you can always ask away. Also check travel sites like Expedia and Orbitz to get names, addresses, and prices.

And while you’re here, make sure to sure San Francisco Hotel Reservations reviews about hotels and attractionsin San Francisco.

San Francisco is also an important financial place, which developed in the 19th century with the financing of big projects, notably the construction of railways. While not quite as important as Wall Street, Financial District of San Francisco is nevertheless essential to the banking institutions of the region. Finally, thanks to its mild climate, California has become the first supplier of food and agriculture goods in the United States. The wine Valley, north of San Francisco, produces 80 % of the wine in the United States.

About 800 000 of them live in San Francisco, the second most densely populated city of the country. Three events have helped boost the city’s population: the Gold rush in the 19th century, the rapid industrialization after World War II and the rise of high technology in the Silicon Valley.

San Francisco, a city of diversity and multiculturalism

San Francisco is an extraordinarily cosmopolitan city, with almost 33 % of the population being of Asian descent, 15 % Hispanic, and 7.8 % African American. Because of this ethnic diversity, San Francisco is often called a “minority-majority” city, in other words a city where non-Hispanic Whites make up less than 50 % of the population.

The poverty rate in San Francisco is lower than the national average: San Franciscans enjoy high living standards and incomes. However, the city has seen the number of homeless increase dramatically since the 1980s, especially in the Tenderloin neighborhood.

San Francisco and the gay community

San Francisco is also home to largest gay and lesbian community in the United States (15 % of the population).

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For more than 2 centuries, the San Francisco bay has remained completely unnoticed by European explorers. Being almost permanently enshrouded in fog, the bay was almost impossible to spot from the open ocean. In 1769, a Spanish expedition led by Gaspar de Portolà accidentally stumbled upon the bay. Colonisation soon followed: the first Spanish settlers arrived in 1776 and built a church that became the first of five missions later developed around the edges of the San Francisco bay. Their headquarter was an adobe fortress, the presidio, built on the site of the park of the same name. The settler’s church, officially known as Nuestra Señora de Dolores, was dedicated to St. Francis de Assisi and nicknamed San Francisco by the Franciscan priests. Later, the nickname was applied to the entire bay.

In 1821, Mexico won independence from Spain and California came under Mexican rule. In 1835, an English sailor, William Richardson, settled in what is now Downtown San Francisco and established a colony, named Yerba Buena, that would soon become a thriving trading post. Six years later, in 1841, he established a ranch north of San Francisco and named it Sausalito.

Lured by rumors of unexploited lands available, American settlers flooded into California. They were tolerated by the Mexican government, but were not allowed to own properties. In May 1846, war was declared between Mexico and the United States: two months later, Mexico lost the battle of Monterey and California became an American State in 1850.

In 1848, an event radically changed the history of San Francisco: small particles of gold were discovered at a sawmill owned by John Sutter, and although Sutter tried to keep the discovery quiet, word of the discovery leaked and reached the ears of a Mormon preacher, Sam Brannan. He set up a shop of shovels, pickaxes, and canned food, and ran through the streets of San Francisco shouting, “Gold! Gold in the American River!”

In a blink of an eye, San Francisco became a ghost town, shop owners hung “Gone to the Diggings” in their window, and sailors abandoned their ship to join the flow of gold diggers. The gold rush was on. Soon, the news spread and flotillas of ships set sail from China, Europe, Australia, and South America, and in one year, the population of San Francisco jumped from less than 1000 inhabitants to more than 25 000.

The period following the gold discovery was chaotic: San Francisco was little more than a slum where lawlessness reigned, and although some miners did find gold, only the merchants were actually able to build a fortune. Demand for goods and services skyrocketed, prices soared, and miners were barely able to make a profit after expenses. Most prospectors never found anything at all; many died of hardship or committed suicide. Despite all the vice and tragedies associated with the gold rush, San Francisco was transformed in mere months from a quiet Spanish settlement into a roaring boomtown.

Meanwhile, investments began to flood into the city, most notably in the Financial District where investors sponsored the gold mining. When gold began to dry up in the 1860s, the construction of railroads took over, building colossal fortunes and developing the city even further.

In 1869, the transcontinental railway linking the east coast to the west coast was completed. Low-paid Chinese workers, who arrived at San Francisco ports in overcrowded ships, did most of the labor. They were very cheap and very effective, ensuring the success of the project. The economic growth that followed the completion of the transcontinental railway led to the rise of a new class of wealthy citizens, who built mansions on Nob Hill and Russian Hill, moving away from ordinary folks on the plains.

In the 1870s, a combination of falling profits from Comstock Lode in western Nevada, repeated droughts and competition from East Coast and Midwest factories led to social unrest and racial tensions. Discontented workers often blamed Chinese workers for their woes, and this led to the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which virtually stopped immigration from China and limited the rights of Chinese people living in the United States until it was repealed in 1943.

At the turn of the century, San Francisco was at the height of its glory, but nature decided otherwise: in April 18th 1906, around 5 a.m., an earthquake hit the city at 8.1 on the Richter scale and caused gas pipes to rupture, starting a chain of fires that fused into a gigantic conflagration. For three days, the city burned. Fire Brigades were finally able to stop the flames by dynamiting entire blocks, but not before 28 000 buildings lay in ruins. “San Francisco is no more”, wrote Jack London.

Reconstruction quickly followed, and a bigger, healthier, and more beautiful city rose from the ashes. A few years later, San Francisco was restored to its full glory, and in 1915, the city hosted the Panama Pacific International Exhibition, a world’s fair that exposed hundreds of thousands of visitors to the town’s unique charm. It was, in other words, business as usual.

Meanwhile, agriculture developed in the region, and California became the first supplier of food and agriculture commodities in the United States. During the years the Great Depression, thousands of people fled misery in the East and the Midwest and headed to the fields of California. In 1933, when the Prohibition was repealed, California became the first wine producer in America.

When the Japanese navy attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States mobilized a massive war machine, and many shipyards along the Pacific Coastline were used to build warships. Workers from the countryside came to San Francisco in massive numbers to work in the city’s shipyards, forcing an enormous housing boom. After the hostilities ended, San Francisco entered into an era of prosperity, enabling massive enlargements of the city, housing developments, a thriving financial district, and the birth of counterculture movements such as the beatniks, gays, and hippies.

In the 1950s, a group of young writers, philosophers, and poets challenged the materialism and conformity of American society by embracing anarchy and Eastern philosophy, expressing their notions in poetry. They called themselves beats, and hung out in North Beach where rents were low and cheap wine was plentiful. Later, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist dubbed them beatniks. Writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti are emblematic figures of the Beat Generation. Howl, Ginsberg’s controversial book, was deemed obscene by American censors, but was published nonetheless in 1956. A trial against Ginsberg and the editor followed, but the charges were later dropped under popular pressure.

This major victory over American censors was a mini-revolution for the younger generation. Freedom of speech became their rally cry, and in the 1960s, a new movement emerged: the hippies. Based at Haight-Ashbury, the hippies challenged every aspect of American society, like materialism, power struggles, and the traditions of older generations. They replaced the beats’ anarchy and alcohol with love, sex, openness, drugs, rock music, and a back-to-nature philosophy. The movement reached its peak during the Summer of Love in 1967, when thousands of young people walked around the city looking for sex, LSD, and marijuana. Soon after, the hippie movement started to decline, leading even to a symbolic burial of the movement in October 1967 by the hippies themselves. Many young people died of overdose, among them Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, others settled down or left San Francisco altogether to pursue their dream.

The end of the hippies gave way to a new movement, the Gay Pride. The gay community of San Francisco developed at the end of the Second World War, when thousands of military personnel were discharged back to the United States, via San Francisco. A significant number of those men were homosexual and decided to stay on in San Francisco.

A gay community developed along Polk Street, and later, in the Castro. Tired of being humiliated by police raids in their neighborhood, a gay political protest movement developed around Harvey Milk in the 1970s. In 1977, Milk was elected Supervisor at the city hall, and became the first gay person to hold a major public office. But in November 1978, a former colleague, Dan White, murdered him and Mayor George Moscone. White was put on trial, but the verdict was considered too soft by the gay community. A riot followed, police cars were overturned and burned in a night of rage.

In the 1980s, a new, deadly disease shifted the emphasis in the gay community: AIDS. The disease struck the community hard and the Castro lost almost a third of its population. The gay community developed organisations to provide informations about the disease, the treatments available, and safe sex.

Today, the gay political movement continue to defend the rights of the community on issues such as gay marriage.

In the 1980, San Francisco became the center of a revolution, the computer technology revolution, which gave a huge boost to the region. A decade later, in the 1990s, a new sector emerged: the Internet industry. In a modern gold fever, engineers, entrepreneurs, and computer technology corporations rushed to the neighboring Silicon Valley to strike it rich: companies were created overnight, and young businessman became millionaires at 25 years old. The speculative machine was on. But in the early 2000s, the Internet bubble burst, former millionaires lost everything and thousands of start-up companies went out of business. Today, activities in the region continue but at a far slower pace.

Meanwhile, Californians came to realize that their energy consumption was unsustainable, and environment became a major issue in California. In 2003, Arnold Schwarzenneger was elected Governor of California, and made curbing Greenhouse gases emissions one of his top priorities. In August 31st 2006, the Global Warming Solutions Acts was voted in the California State Legislature. The bill was aimed at bringing Greenhouse gases emissions at the level of 1990 by the year 2020. It was a major step in a country where the Federal government refused to ratify the Protocol of Kyoto.

For information about stays in SF, visit http://www.san-francisco-hotel-reservations.com.

For information about SF, visit San Francisco Hotel Reservations.

California climate varies greatly, from arid to subarctic, depending on latitude, elevation and proximity to the coast. Northern California has a Mediterranean climate with mild, wet winter and sunny, dry summer, which makes it an ideal destination for tourists. The region is known for its enormous economic potential: natural resources, agriculture, high-tech firms (many of them located in the Silicon Valley) and cheap labor (mainly from Mexico).

San Francisco Climate

San Francisco is famous for its hills and fog. Being a peninsula, the city is heavily influenced by the cool currents of the Pacific Ocean that keep the temperature stable all year around and produce a mild climate that varies little throughout the seasons. Due to its hilly terrain and strong maritime influences, San Francisco displays a great variety of microclimates: the high hills in the center of the city are responsible for a 20 % variance in annual rainfall between different parts of the city and shield eastern neighborhoods from the cool and foggy conditions of the western side. The combination of the heat of the mainland with the cold water of the Pacific Ocean produces the famous fog that covers San Francisco for much of the year, especially during summer. Unlike Los Angeles, which is warm and dry, the weather in San Francisco is often surprisingly chilly, especially at night. In a single day, the weather can change from sunny and warm to windy and cold. It is preferable to visit the city during spring or autumn, when the fog is less intense, or winter, when there are fewer tourists and hotel prices are lower.

from_http://www.rssweather.com/

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California is the third biggest state of America, after Texas and Alaska. It is bordered on the North by Oregon, on the East by Nevada, on the Southwest by Arizona and on the South by Mexico. California is part of the so-called Sun Belt, a dynamic and prosperous region that stretches across the South and Southwest of the United States. The state is generally divided into Northern and Southern California, although the boundary between the two is more cultural than geographical, San Francisco being a Northern City and Los Angeles a Southern one.

picture from http://www.lib.washington.edu

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Its beautiful scenery and cosmopolitan athmosphere make it a favorite destination for tourists. Born during the Gold rush in the 19th century, San Francisco has become a refuge for artists and hippies and is home to the largest gay community in America. It has successfully integrated its migrants who came from all around the world, lured by the prospects of a better life in California, and its citizens enjoy some of the highest living standards in America. Whether you are crossing the majestic Golden Gate Bridge or contemplating the Yosemite Park’s giant trees, San Francisco and its surroundings are a sight to behold. In the following paragraphs you will discover the gems hidden throughout this amazing city, its geography and history. Let’s go, shall we?

-Authors of San Francisco Hotel Reservations

Going to San Francisco for vacation is great. Going to San Francisco for vacation with a great San Francisco hotel deals is even better. Finding hotels in San Francisco is not difficult. Finding San Francico hotel deals isn’t either, as long as you listen to our advices! Here are five great advices to find great San Francisco hotel deals and values.

First, if you can, plan your vacations off-season, or weekends. During off-season the number of tourists is low. Because San Francisco welcomes many conferences, meetings and symposiums, normally, during weekdays, business travellers will fill up the hotels, while very few business people will stay over the weekend and the number of customers will drop drastically. During those low periods, due to less demand, hotels are willing to drop their prices as much as 50%, giving you the opportunity of finding great San Francisco hotel deals. These San Francisco hotel deals are especially great if you are eying a five stars hotel in San Francisco.

Second, many credit cards or other types of cards give specials deals, promotions or discounts on some hotels. Check your credit card to find out such San Francisco hotel deals. Also, some hotels also offer special promotions for seniors, military and students. If you are using “air miles” or similar types of point cards, find out if you can a discount or even a free stay at specific hotels using your points.

Third, if possible, book online. Because most online booking sites have special arrangements with hotels, they will have San Francisco hotel deals you will never find anywhere else. By booking online, it will also be easier to compare San Francisco hotel deals between hotels, and even between nights! Some hotels will have a substantial difference in prices between a Sunday and a Monday!

Fourth, if you are traveling with young kids, find out which San Francisco hotel deals allow kids to stay for free. Find out if the rooms have a small kitchenettes where you can prepare some instant noodles or store some milk for the kids and cut cost on the trip. You can also inquire about San Francisco hotel deals that offer free breakfast. Another great way to cut cost when you go on vacation.

Fifth, look for last minute San Francisco hotel deals if you can play with your schedule. If you are flexible about the location and the name of the hotel, some interesting booking websites offer you cheap San Francisco hotel deals with savings over 40% off the regular price. However, with those websites, you won’t know the name and the exact location of the hotel until you’re credit card is charged and until the very last minute. Fortunately, in most cases, they try to meet your request in terms of location as close as possible.

If you follow these advices, chances are that you will find yourself some great San Francisco hotel deals, and will enjoy your stay to the fullest!

Find yourself a great San Francisco hotel deals and San Francisco hotel reservations here.