While free wi-fi and bacon-loaded breakfast buffets are nothing to balk at, you have to admit that some hotel amenities are a bit superfluous. Do we really need motorized blackout shades, fitness centers, turn-down service mints, central air conditioning, and plumbing? If you’ve had it up to your overall straps with these highfalutin add-ons, then head on over to the heart of Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania’s agritourism industry: Schrute Farms.
Proprietor Dwight K. Schrute III operates Schrute Farms along with his cousin/farmhand/bellman, Mose, whose English can only be described as “pre-industrial and mostly religious”. Guests can expect non-sedentary pleasures such as whittling, maneur tilling, and hands-on preparation of industrial-sized vats of organic beet pudding. Spaß haben!
Reality and fiction overlap once again as the imaginary world of The Office bleeds into our own. The Tripadvisor entry for Schrute Farms currently has 643 earnest user reviews. A recent feature on this mythos-reinforcing phenomenon in the New York Times (big thanks to Randy Ludacer for the heads-up) will undoubtedly elevate this number substantially.
From the NYT Article:
In September 2007, the show asked to use TripAdvisor, a travel Web site, in an episode in which Dwight turns his beet farm into a bed and breakfast. Christine Petersen, the chief marketing officer for TripAdvisor, was thrilled. “We don’t have a big marketing budget and don’t do TV ads,” she said. “This was the big time.”TripAdvisor set up a review page, thinking it would be good for a quick laugh or two. Paul Lieberstein, who wrote the episode, called “Money,” never even went back to the site afterward. “We thought it would be fun, but then we didn’t think about it anymore,” he said in an interview.But Schrute Farms is still doing big business — for TripAdvisor. Reruns and DVDs keep inspiring new visits to the site and there are now over 600 reviews (more than for many major Manhattan hotels, Ms. Petersen said).
In addition, this straight-faced Inside Small Business article details the opening of Schrute Farms, concluding with some helpful info:
The Schrute Farms B&B grand opening is this Friday. Check-in is at 3:20 pm, no earlier, and check-out is at 5:15 am, no later. This weekend’s guests will receive a complimentary membership to Dwight’s Goju-Ryu karate dojo.
From the season 4 episode, Money:
