Jim Halfens. [Pic Source: New York Times]

Are you fed up with your marriage? Feel like ending it along with a spa treatment and a buffet breakfast with a sneaky spliff on the side? Yes? Well you can now check in to one of a number of Dutch hotels for a long-weekend and get your divorce sorted at the same time. A great idea, I call it the reverse-honeymoon.

Dutch entrepreneur Jim Halfens, after watching a mate of his go through a complicated 5-month divorce decided he could make the whole process easier with room-service and a mini-bar. Genius.

Their website quotes fees from  € 2,499 where you will be treated to a long week-end of pampering at one of 20 hotels across the Netherlands while a team of professionals takes care of your silly life-long commitment. Couples check into separate rooms with the hotel staff being briefed on the situation as “You don’t want the hotel crew wishing you a very nice weekend and hoping you have lots of fun here,” says Mr. Halfens

But it gets better. Mr. Halfens is taking the idea to the US. And in the land of the brave and the free when you have a good idea you don’t just execute it, you make a reality show about it.

The show is supposed to come out later this year. With one of the producers saying, one imagines in a loud voice while wearing over-sized sunglasses indoors, “Divorce Hotel is as real as it gets,” he says. “If there’s a conflict, it’s real because the stakes are real.” American couples unhappy with their marriage will check into a hotel for the weekend, the cameras will roll, complimentary bathrobes will be donned, and at the end of it you have another banal, eye-bleedingly awful reality show, and hopefully two single people.

As would be imagined US lawyers are saying this is all just a gimmick as divorces are far too complex to be sorted out between massages, gym sessions and multiple visits to the breakfast buffet.

The New York Times asked Robert S. Cohen who dealt with Mayor Bloomberg and Ivana Trump’s divorces what he thought. “The notion of being able to — at the beginning of a split-up — spend a weekend putting these various pieces together and coming to a solution to them would be virtually impossible,” Mr. Cohen says. “I don’t see how one would do it and come up with a fair result.”

It’s not surprising that people are looking to make a buck through divorce. The New York Times reports that the ‘divorce industry’ is worth anything from $50 billion to $175 billion a year. Now who could begrudge Mr. Halfens trying to get a little piece of that action?

Personally I think it is a great idea. If you finish up the divorce proceedings quick enough you could go on one of the many tours the hotel offers, try to find a rebound at the hotel bar, or have one last night of dirty sweaty hotel sex with your ex.

[Sources: The New York Times, Divorcehotel.com]