Word: hotelful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...just spent 12 hours on the torture rack of business travel and are heading for your hotel. What kind of experience do you want beyond the entryway? A doorman leading you into a shiny, marble lobby, with Muzak gently playing in the background (and a hand out for a tip)? Or would you rather enter a scene out of Friends, with comfortable couches, Nina Simone on the sound track and a game of pool going on? If you desire the latter, you're probably under 35, or perhaps you just think like someone...
...hoteliers such as Starwood's Brian McGuinness are on to you. Pulling up to a warehouse in an anonymous Hawthorne, N.Y., industrial park, McGuinness, head of Starwood's new line of hotels, Aloft, is eager to show off the full-scale model of the group's newest brand, a 136-room hotel with an average rate of $150 per night. Leading the way, McGuinness stops before a brightly lit entrance. A waterfall cascades down a wall, replete with the soothing sounds of a babbling brook, "to wash away troubles," he explains as he passes through the second set of doors...
...they won't have to, since the competition is revving up new hotel designs too. Hotel Indigo, which InterContinental Hotel Group launched in 2004, is rolling out in Miami, St. Louis, Mo., and 12 other locations. NYLO, created in part by an executive from Starwood's W, hopes to trade on Manhattan coolness. Even familiar faces like Wyndham, Hyatt, Marriott's Courtyard and Hilton's Garden Inn are getting wired...
Like the changing focal point of the home--the combined kitchen/family room where everyone now hangs out--the Gen Y customer wants a similar seamless experience on the road. That's a big change from boomers, who wanted to be rewarded for traveling. They expected a hotel that was nicer than their home, which Fairmont, Four Seasons and Ritz-Carlton have provided since the '80s. According to Y Partnership, this next generation of travelers wants casual food available anytime, free Internet, views and self-service check-in/checkout. Gen Y may represent only 9% of business travelers at the moment...
...including W, and funded in part by Lehman Brothers' private-equity arm, has latched onto the same multiuse lobby, designed to encourage guests to socialize and kitted out with cool features like wi-fi, chairs that hang from the ceiling and a Nintendo Wii. Offering 135-to-200-room hotels that cost an average of $120 to $200 per night and an upcoming brand, XP, at the $95-to-$110-per-night level, NYLO opened its first hotel in Plano, Texas, a suburb of Dallas, and expects 50 more to open or be in contract by 2010, including...