Dan Martin: Editor's Blog

When you check-in at a hotel and the guest queuing in front of you tells the receptionist: "There's no remote control for the TV in my room", you know you're not going to be spending the next few hours in the lap of luxury. And when the receptionist replies: "Sorry, we've run out but there are buttons on top of the TV you can use to change the channels", you know you've just arrived in the world of seriously low budget hotels.

The above tale isn’t theory; it's hard, cold fact. And it happened to me at the Farringdon branch of Travelodge in London, where I had the misfortune to stay earlier this week.

When I booked my stay, I wasn't expecting to be treated like a king but I was hoping for some level of comfort and customer service. But not at Travelodge Farringdon.

With the company taking full payment in advance, there was no "Have you stayed with us before?" or "Please take the lift to the second floor" but just a quick hello and '232' scrawled on a piece of paper displaying a photocopy of the Travelodge logo.

The British Airways versus Virgin battle has been raging for years. In fact, pretty much as soon as Richard Branson set up his company in 1984, the two airlines became instant enemies. Their rivalry is well-documented, particularly the infamous BA 'dirty tricks' campaign which led to a court case and the UK's national carrier being forced to cough up millions.

Well, this week, the public slanging match returned.

As Sir Richard quipped that BA is "not worth much anymore" and urged the government not to bail the business out should its current financial troubles get any worse, BA's shares tumbled. All good for the nation's favourite entrepreneur but should the UK's budding Bransons take this as an indication that criticising competitors is good for business? In my opinion, no.

Amid all the talk over Sir Alan Sugar's appointment as Gordon Brown's new Enterprise Tsar/Champion/Celebrity/Overlord* (*delete as appropriate), the rebranding of the government department with which he'll have the most dealings slipped through almost unnoticed.

I'd just about got used to the mouthful that is the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), a creation which resulted from the rebranding of the old Department for Trade and Industry in June 2007. But now I've got to remember a new acronym following the merger of BERR with the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS), another section of the government set up just under two years ago at a cost to the taxpayer of £7m.

The three letters I now need to keep in mind are BIS or to give it its official title; Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

Ministers claim that the new super department, headed up by Lord Mandelson, is designed to help the UK out of the recession. Not a bad thing I suppose but do we really need another rebranding?

Success and failure in equal measures has befallen many an entrepreneur and none more so than former Dragons' Den panellist Rachel Elnaugh.

As the present decade began, Elnaugh was riding on the crest of a wave. Her experiences company Red Letter Days was flying high with a £17.5m turnover and she was the proud recipient of several high profile awards including the Veuve Clicquot Businesswoman of the Year and the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year. But in 2005, it all went horribly wrong. Red Letter Days collapsed with debts of £12m and in a cruel twist of fate, the company was bought by Elnaugh's fellow Dragons' Den panellists Peter Jones and Theo Paphitis.

Elnaugh has now returned to the business world and is running a successful consultancy where she advises other entrepreneurs on how to avoid the kind of failure she experienced.

At last week's Business Startup show in London, I joined others at a seminar conducted by Elnaugh where she outlined 10 top tips which the budding dragons among you would do well to adopt.

1. Is your business worth saving? If it's simply not working, move on.