Hi,

We are in New York City and had to go to Basel for a workshop (the workshop site was about 5 minutes by bus to the main train station at Basel), and unfortunately everything had been booked up when we started looking; so we ended up going with Fairs Worldwide. BIG MISTAKE!!!! (and a couple of folks who we met at the place we stayed had a similar experience too:( ).

Focusing on FWW:
First, FWW has you pay up the money up front without informing which place they are putting you up at, and there is no recourse to get a refund if they put you up in a horrible little place far from civilization (case in point). Second, while they badger you constantly with urgent emails asking you to pay up quickly to hold the place for you, they will take their own sweet time to make out a reservation voucher (in fact, we ended up having to call Australia several times to talk to Lydia, the FWW manager), which at the end of the day is a fairly simple piece of paper on a standard template. Thirdly, they have no idea about the quality or location of the properties they are reserving (or if they do, they are not telling the tourist). They told us our property was 10 minutes by tram from Basel train station. Turns out it takes a 10 minutes bus ride (no tram) from the property to Liestal train station and another 10 minutes train ride from Liestal train station to Basel, with about a 10 minutes wait in between (that adds up to about a 30 minutes wait). And BTW, the bus stops working after 8:30 pm, which leaves you on your own to get back to the property.

Coming to the property:
To put it mildly, this was a dump and a stinky place to boot (smelt of spoiled onions or garlic, take your pick). We are 3 (2 adults and a 2.5 year old baby), and had asked FWW for a apartment with a kitchen; we got a bed-and-breakfast facility with no kitchen and a shared bathroom. As indicated earlier, this property (called Curry Hus, in Neu Nuglar) was in the middle of nowhere, and the rooms were relatively small and had no air-conditioning. Regarding the ability to heat food for the baby (the place also had a restaurant), the owners had the bright suggestion that they could offer us hot water from the coffee machine for heating things up (no offer to use the restaurant facilities to heat up the food). Our son caught a bad cold, and we asked them if they could start up the heat in our room; they refused saying that the heat does not start up till October, and instead provided us the hospital emergency number to have him checked out there. The breakfast consisted of cold bread, OJ, jam and coffee; (apparently, you can opt out of the breakfast with FWW, not that they will tell you that), for 208 swiss Fr/day that is pathetic. Oh, and did I mention that there is a handgun in the guest bathroom....

Since it was way out of Basel, the people of Nuglar and Liestal don't speak any language other than Swiss German, and they would get very angry and upset when we spoke in English. So if you do go to stay here (why??), make sure that either your German is good, or you have a colleague who speaks good German with you.

To top it all off, we took a cab from Nuglar to the Liestal train station, and the cabbie initially tried to get us to go to Basel Europort (even though we were flying out of Zurich), and kept insisting he would give us a great deal, and then when we got to the train station, insisted on an additional 50% bonus over the rate on the cab meter (as the old adage goes, where is the cop when you need him?). All-in-all, a horrible experience.

My recommendation for somebody who has to attend a conference in Basel, and for whom the hotels in Basel are booked up is to get accomodation in Freiburg across the border. The ICE train takes only about 30 minutes to get from Freiburg to Basel, and the hotels in Freiburg are much nicer and about the same price as the Basel region (and the people are nicer and speak/understand English). We went from Curry Hus to Hotel Stadt Freiburg, which is like going from hell to heaven.

Hope this helps somebody. Give Fairs Worldwide a wide berth and go with some hotel instead, where atleast you can cancel if you don't like the place.