A Personal Comment by Wilf - 7th March 2002
This page was started in November 2001.  As soon as I had organised my own accommodation in St. Helier I sent an email to the Helicon committee, telling them of the information that I had collected about alternative accommodation in St. Helier.  Since then I have had no reply form anyone connected with Helicon that relates to alternative accommodation.  It would seem that nobody on the Helicon committee is interested in helping fans of modest means to go to Helicon. The only accommodation on offer on the Helicon website is that at the Hotel de France at around £50 a night.  Since you are reading this, pehaps you might like to ask the Helicon committee why they only want rich fans to attend the convention.

I have tried to find out as much information as possible about alternative accommodation in St. Helier. The list of establishments that exist or have existed is well over 100 in St Helier alone. Of those that are still operational, many do not open until after Easter. There are also 15 hotels that I think are too expensive to be included in this list of 33 establishments.

I have included telephone numbers for all the places I have found and an email address where there is one. The prices shown are the price per person per night for bed and breakfast. The inclusion of a property in this list is not an indication that accommodation is available at Easter. Always check!

The Jersey Tourism website is pretty limited. It will only give you one name of somewhere to stay after you have provided dates. (At the moment the booking service will only work with Microsoft Explorer- it crashes Netscape 4.7) There is no list of hotels and guest houses that you can access from the site. However, there is a map of St. Helier available in non-overlapping sections. It has no distance scale. It is the only map of St. Helier that I have found on the internet. I have worked out from paper maps that I have been sent that the squares on this map are roughly 300 yards wide. (One map of Jersey has a scale. This was used to estimate the scale of the St. Helier map.) Multimap, Mapquest and Maporama internet map services do not cover the Channel Islands.

Latest News 05/01/02
The foregoing comment about the Jersey Tourism website has had an effect. I have had an email to say that it is planned to offer a browsable list of accommodation in St. Helier with a correction for the Netscape crashing problem. The list will offer all places that meet basic input criteria. It is hoped that the revised website will be operational early in February. However it still looks as if one will have to go one step further on, after finding a place, to check the prices and availability.

Latest News 27/02/02
I have provisionally produced a composite of the St. Helier Street Map sections but it is a very large file - 700K. It takes between 2.5 and 3 minutes to load with a 56k modem. The original rectangular map has had most of its corners knocked off to cut down the file size. The map shows the locations of nearly all the places on the Accommodation List that I have produced. It might be an idea to save the map from my website for your own use when you are planning your trip. You should have no difficulty in getting a proper printed street map of St. Helier when you get to St. Helier. There are three publishers of St. Helier street maps.

An Impression of the Jersey Tourism Website
The Jersey Tourism website now claims to work with Netscape 4.7 for bookings but it still doesn't. It does work with Explorer and very slowly with Netscape 6.21. The layout is still hopeless. I know that Jersey is a holiday destination but thare is no need to insist on asking someone where they are coming from on the opening page. If soneone needs a language other than English, why not use little flags for the other languages? If they need statistics about where people come from, a check list could be provided in a section called Planning Your Holiday. There is little point in collecting statistics about occasional browsers.
The submenus are designed for people with good eyesight and a 21 inch (or bigger) monitor. It would be so much better to provide tagged icons for things like maps, buses, hotels and guest houses etc. There are a few pictures to look at on one of the opening pages but these would be better organised in a gallery that includes views of a lot more places. Only one good picture is needed on an opening page as a sort of heading or banner.

There are four basic ways of arranging web pages. The most common is the sort with a semi-permanent section or index on the left side. Another uses card file tabs or something equivalent at the top. Some use both of these, and those like mine use a free form that is intended to suit the contents of each page individually. (I try to make the most of the available screen space.) Most good web sites do NOT have large areas of unused space on any pages. ALL good web sites have some way of changing from one thread to another and back again with links. You will NOT find this facility on this site. There are no cross links at all. The best way to navigate around the site is to use the Go list in Netscape. (There isn't such a thing in Explorer). Selecting Back will usually lead to a dead end. (You will have to ALT+Tab through the increasing collection of opened pages. (Explorer is just the same as Netscape in this respect.) On a decent web site there would be a link back to Home on every page. No so on this one. Try looking for it!

There is a submenu of Getting Around Jersey that does not provide links to the maps - such as they are. There is a link to the maps in a sub menu of About Jersey!  After you have browsed a bit, just try getting back to the index page. Press Alt + Tab (on a PC) to see how many pages you have opened and try to guess which page has the index.

The map of the whole island is too small to see enough detail to choose which area to look at. A click on an area will load four squares in a relatively clear view and there are arrows that enable one to go from one set of four squares to the next. However, none of the enlarged views indicates which squares are on view. There is no overlap between views. (Compare with Maporama, Mapquest or Multimap.) The guide lists at the top of the map page are OK but again one has to peer at four squares at a time. I reckon that more than half the readers of this page could do a much better job of designing a web site that is intended to convey information about Jersey in an attractive manner.

Buses
There is a bus service No. 15 from the airport to St. Helier Bus Station (£1.53) and buses 3b, 4 and 23 run past the Hotel de France (75p) from there.
The bus timetables also insist on opening a new page for every access. If one selects Routes and then a route, going back to Routes and selecting another route opens yet another page. YUCK!   This has been checked with Explorer, Netscape 4.7 (that you can't book with - it crashes if you try to make a booking) and with Netscape 6.21 (that does get to the booking section - slowly)..
The symbols showing the stops on the routes are incredibly small. You will need a magnifying glass and a 35 inch monitor to read the names of the stops. The clearer way to see what stops there are is to look at the ABCD fare table at the bottom of most timetable pages. The lowest fare (A) is 75p. The highest fare (D) is £1.53.

(To the Jersey Tourism Webmaster: You said that you would make it better by early February but NONE of the basic faults have been fixed. Do you want to give the impression that Jersey is just as disorganised as your website?)

A Better Site
As ever, the internet service that has provided me with places to stay most often is Smoothhound  This link is to the Jersey accommodation list. The search for "Jersey Accommodation" with Yahoo/Google brings up a lot of references. Most of these are for package holidays and some are way out of date.
Please remember that the following Accommodation List is only a guide. I can accept no responsibility for any errors that you may find in it.

Not on the Web
Jersey Tourism has sent me some maps by post with a complete list of registered hotels and guest houses. The list of establishments apparently does not include a large number of hotels that appear on one of the maps. Only a few guest houses are marked on this map and none of these appear in the lists of properties.

The lists of places that I have been supplied with provide between them the range of prices and the 2002 Dates of Opening. This list is incomplete. The other list gives broad indications of dates of opening for some of the places that do not have dates of opening in the 2002 Dates of Opening list. I have excluded places that are not apparently open during Easter 2002 and places with a minimum cost greater than £30.00.

Hotels are listed with H1 to H4. The number represents the number of stars. Guest houses have GH1 to GH3. The number represents the number of diamonds. (More stars or diamonds indicate more facilities but are generally more expensive.)

Prices
I have revised the prices shown in the list to those supplied by Jersey Tourism except where I have been supplied a price directly by the hotel or guest house concerned. Where I have found independent indications of how prices range during the year it can be taken as a rough and ready rule that the price at Easter is one third of the way up the range shown. If there is just one price, that is the price at Easter. (CB) = Continental Breakfast included in price.

An email quotation from Marina Brydon of Fairholme Guest House.
"Most Guest houses will be able to arrange all travel at an inclusive price which will also include a transfer from the airport direct to the GH and again a return to the airport on the day of departure. Which does represent good value. Also it is worth noting that many GH (ourselves included) offer discounts for Seniors or conference delegates or groups of people, for example we offer a discount to a group of 6 people or more all booking at the same time."