I’m in London this week for a few days to be part of the judging panel for the second annual Travel Retail Awards program for TRBusiness.
My assignment: evaluate spirits, cosmetics, chocolates, small electronics and other products sold in airport shops.
Tought job, right? But I’m taking the testing and evaluating very seriously.
While in town, I did take the change to stop by the Bankside, a new very fun and “design-forward” hotel in a cool neighborhood on the the south bank of the River Thames. (Sea Containers London, another swank London hotel I’ve had the pleasure of staying in before, is just a few doors down the street.)
I wasn’t able to spend the night at 161-room Banskside (part of Marriott’s Autograph collection of properties), but I did get a tour around the art-filled lobby, a look at a room and a lovely (hosted, thank-you!) dinner in the Art Yard Bar & Kitchen.
While I couldn’t try everything on the menu, I can heartily recommend the dishes I tried, especially the Monkfish Catapanla, (a hearty fish stew for two with several types of seafood), as well as the Pear Parfait and Dark Chocolate Fondant desserts.
The Bankside has several ‘bonus’ amenities that seem unique and/or quite amusing.
Guests find marshmallows on their pillows at turndown. Bars with taps to dispense several types of water (sorry, not beer) are in each hall. And just outside the elevator on each floor is a vending machine where guests may purchase small bottles of pre-made cocktails, wine, liquor and other ‘necessities,’ such as an emergency engagement ring, and handmade sparkly pants.
A big Stuck At the Airport thank-you to the Hilton Los Angeles Airport hotel, which hosted me for a night recently while I was in town to tour Los Angeles International Airport for a story about the best places to eat in each terminal and a visit to the brand new United Airlines Polaris lounge.
I hadn’t stayed at this property for quite some time and was pleased to find upgraded rooms, strong WiFi and live music in the lobby, which is evidently a regular Wednesday evening feaute.
This hotel has a variety of dining options, but I tried out Andiamo, the onsite northern Italian restaurant, where the staff made a solo diner feel welcome and which has a great scallop dish on the menu.
This hotel may also have the hardest-working shuttle bus driver. He was driving when I arrived in the evening and there again the next morning and he was super-pleasant to every single rider, even though few of them gave him a tip for lifting their super heavy suitcases on and off of the bus.
Have a favorite place to stay near Los Angeles International Airport? Please share your recommendations.
There’s no need to stay home over the holidays. Santa not only knows if you’ve been naughty or nice, and he will deliver your gifts even if you’re staying in one the many hotels around the country offering these fun holiday-themed packages and over-the-top Christmas experiences.
If you’ve been really good this year, Santa may even join you for breakfast or give you a surfing lesson.
Here’s a list I put together for CNBC:
Surfing lessons – from Santa
Courtesy Surfing Santa & Florida’s Space Coast
Santa is not only a sleigh rider, he’s also, evidently, a surfer.
The annual Surfing Santas event held in Florida’s Cocoa Beach celebrates St. Nick’s secret hobby every Christmas Eve morning with 300 surfing Santas and thousands of spectators. Travelers who want to join the fun can book a hotel package that includes a surfing lesson and a visit on the beach from one of the Surfing Santas.
“BIG” package, with shopping spree in New York City
Courtesy Arlo Hotel/Nikki Vanko
The Arlo Hotel in New York city is offering ‘The BIG Holiday Package’ in honor of the 30th anniversary of the classic film “Big,” starring Tom Hanks as a twelve-year old boy who wakes up in the body of a 30-year old man. Valid Dec. 1 through Dec. 31, the package includes a $500 shopping spree, a driver to take you shopping throughout the city, and a Chef’s dinner for 4 in the hotels’ heated “ice huts.” As a bonus, guests will get to play on oversize piano keys, just like the ones in the “BIG” movie, with a photographer available to document the adventure. Prices start at $3,600 per night.
Bedtime Butlers
Coutesy Kimpton Riverplace Hotel Portland
In Portland, OR, the Kimpton RiverPlace Hotel on the banks of the Willamette River, has a year-round Bedtime butler who makes the rounds a few nights a week, delivering a cart of traditional nightcaps and a selection of other treats to guests. During the holidays the cart is decorated with lights and Christmas stockings and is stocked with books, house-made cookies, and hot cocoa for kids, as well as al bourbon, wine, hot tea, toiletries and slippers for adults. Guests can’t schedule the BedtimeButler; her or she visits rooms at random, so guests are advised to keep an ear out for a knock at their door.
Decadent dining
Chicago Athletic Association Hotel
The Chicago Athletic Association Hotel, located in a historic property on Michigan Avenue that was once a men’s only private club, is offering an onsite progressive dining experience as part of its Sip, Savor, Stay package. The evening starts with champagne by the fireplace, appetizers on the glass-enclosed rooftop restaurant, dinner in the hotel’s Cherry Circle Room, dessert in the Milk Room microbar, and a nightcap in the Game Room, with a privately reserved bocce court. Breakfast the next day is included and as a bonus guests get to take home two of the hotel’s bathrobes (which mimic boxing robes) and two branded glasses. Price: $3,600 for a two-night stay.
Inspired by Dior in Denver
Ramble Hotel Denver
To coincide with the holiday shopping season and the Denver Art Museum’s exhibit “Dior: From Paris to the World,” Denver’s Ramble Hotel is offering the ”Chauffeur to Dior: From Paris to the World”package.
In addition to a night at the hotel, guests will be able to shop for vintage Dior jewelry from their room, drink specialty “Ginette” cocktails named for Christian Dior’s sister, tour the museum’s Dior exhibit with VIP tickets and be driven to and from the museum’s Dior exhibit in a vintage Roll Royce car. Package starts at $1,300 and is available through March 3, 2019.
Decorated suite and holiday treats
Mandirn Hotel NY/David Lewis-Taylor
As part of the Holiday Winter Wonderland Suite Escape package at the Mandarin Oriental, New York guests will stay in a suite outfitted with an ornately- decorated 9-
tree( and a second 3-foot decorated artificial tree), nutcrackers, live wreath, hanging stockings and other festive holiday touches. Holiday-themed food and beverages, including hot chocolate with Grand Marnier, a gingerbread house, cake lollipops and other treats are included. Available through December 31, 2018. Rates begin at $5,775 per night with a two-night minimum stay.
Christmas in a vintage trailer
The Vintages
The Vintages trailer resort in Oregon’s Willamette Valey has 33 trailers in 21 different styles and during the holiday offers two $50 holiday add-on packages. One includes candy cane lawn decorations and a champagne cocktail kit, complete with bottle of local champagne; the other is a campfire-themed package that includes a s’mores kit, Moonstruck gourmet hot cocoa, a bottle of The Vintages Pinot Noir, and a “Little Red Campfire” fire pit.
Sugar plum fairies and elf tuck-ins
Mission Inn Festival of Lights
Fun holiday packages are available during the six-week Festival of at the Mission Inn Hotel & Spa in Riverside, CA.
The two-night Sugar Plum Fairy Suite Package (Rates start at $1,419) includes a stay in the decorated themed suite with holiday trimmings, a holiday tree, stockings, holiday lights and candy décor. Included is a cupcake turndown amenity for four with hot cocoa and a $200 dining credit. To sweeten the experience, for $50 per child, guests can add on the hotel’s signature “elf tuck-in” amenity, which features a resident elf that delivers small, present-filled stockings to children and tucks them into bed with a bedtime story.
Ultimate Christmas Package
Ritz- Carlton Fort. Lauderdale
The Fully Wrapped: Ultimate Christmas Experience package is available for one family December 24-26 at The Ritz-Carlton, Fort Lauderdale. (Price starts at $12,999) The experience includes lodging in an ocean view 3-bedroom suite, gift wrapping services, a spa package and champagne. On Christmas morning, there will be breakfast with Santa, who will arrive bearing wrapped gifts that will include a pair of custom Adidas Sneakers, an American Girl Doll, a Pandora bracelet with charm, a bottle of Island Company Run and a voucher for a private rum room experience with a mixologist. The package includes use of a pool cabana for the day, complete with cabana attire and, a photographer to document all the special moments.
Sheraton Hotels’ “Heart for the City” tour is creating, short-stay, locally-themed, super-Instagramable installations in seven hotel lobbies around the world.
The Seattle installation is onsite through October 11 (so hurry over) at the Sheraton Grand Seattle and includes a series of “vignettes” of classic city sites and experiences, including a chance to ‘hang’ off the Space Needle, ride an umbrella on a mini zip line, pose for a selfie in the recreated storefront of the original Starbucks cafe and experience assorted other Emerald Cities spots.
The campaign kicked off in Quebec at the new Sheraton Saint-Hyacinthe Hotel and moves on to the Sheraton Cairo Hotel & Casino (Cairo, Egypt) on November 7; the Sheraton Grand Sydney Hyde Park on November 15; and the Sheraton Santos Hotel in Santos, Brazil sometime in December.
In 2019, these fun installations will appear in at the Sheraton Grand Bengaluru Whitefield Hotel & Convention Center in Bengaluru, India and at the Sheraton Beijing Lize in Beijing, China.
Each city will have complex temporary installations that reflect that location, so if you’re nearby, be sure to make your way over for fun photo ops.
“We are featuring this group of hotels because they represent some of the best the brand has to offer. Several have recently completed major renovations and have had long-standing relationships in their communities that span decades, while new properties like the Sheraton Saint-Hyacinthe Hotel are in place to quickly become the gathering place for locals,” said Mara Hannula, Vice President of Marketing, Classic Premium Brands, Marriott International, in a statement. “Our guests want to experience the destination and the Heart for the City tour allows us to deliver on that in a creative and immersive way.”
My “At the Airport” column on USA TODAY this month explores the history of airport hotels, including the three (so far) hotels I found that claim to be the first airport hotel.
The sprawling San Francisco Airport Hilton opened in 1959. Photo courtesy San Francisco International Airport.
Aviation historians say that, in fact, the first hotel built at a United States airport opened its doors to the traveling public on July 15, 1929, on the grounds of what is now the North Field of Oakland International Airport.
“The Oakland Airport Inn was adjacent to the dirt runway,” said Ian Wright, Director of Operations at the Oakland Aviation Museum, “And the structure still stands today.”
At opening, Oakland Airport Inn boasted 37 rooms, a restaurant, a barbershop and a ticket office, according to Air & Space Magazine,. But in 1931, in a article concluding that airport hotels would never catch on with travelers, Aviation described the hotel as being “almost completely devoid of patrons after a year of operations” because two airlines had shifted flights away from the Oakland airport.
Restaurant that once served the Oakland Airport Inn. Courtesy Port of Oakland
To fill the rooms, the hotel management instead courted pilots and students from the Boeing School of Aeronautics, which operated on the airport’s grounds from 1929 until the early 1940s.
Courtesy Port of Oakland
Today the building that housed the Oakland Airport Inn is home to the Amelia Earhart Senior Squadron 188, a local unit of the Civil Air Patrol.
That Earhart homage is fitting: Amelia Earhart was a regular guest at the Oakland Airport Inn. And in May 1937 she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, set out from the airport’s North Field for their ill-fated second attempt to fly around the world.
Ford Trimotor plane flies over Dearborn Inn at Ford Airport in 1931. Courtesy The Henry Ford
While guests can no longer check-into a room at the Oakland Airport Inn, they are able to book rooms at the Dearborn Inn, in Dearborn, Michigan (near Detroit).
The hotel opened its doors on July 1, 1931 and along with claiming this to be the world’s first airport hotel, the Michigan Historical Marker out front says Henry Ford built the inn to serve Detroit-bound guests arriving at the Ford Airport, which opened in 1924.
Stout Air Services, run by Edsel Ford’s friend William Stout, began offering flights between Dearborn and Grand Rapids, MI in 1926 and in 1929 was flying daily (except Sunday) to both Chicago and Cleveland using Ford Trimotor aircraft.
Courtesy The Henry Ford
“The Dearborn Inn was actually the brainchild of Henry Ford’s son, Edsel, and was intended to be the ‘front door’ to the city of Dearborn and to The Ford Motor Company,” said Charles Sable, Curator of Decorative Arts at The Henry Ford, “Edsel wanted to provide employees, visitors and airline flight crews with nice, comfortable accommodations.”
Noted Detroit architect Alfred Kahn designed the building for a hotel Edsel wanted modeled after the charming New England inns with Colonial-style décor he’d stay in when traveling back and forth between his homes in Detroit and Bar Harbor, Maine.
Cafeteria at the Dearborn Inn – Courtesy The Henry Ford
“The exterior of the hotel is vaguely a Colonial design,” said Sable, “But one feature that’s really cool is that at the tippy top there’s a ‘widow’s walk,’ or observation platform, where guests could go out and watch the planes land at the airport.”
Today the Dearborn Inn operates as a Marriott Hotel featuring modern rooms that are still decorated with Colonial-style furniture and fabrics. The 231-room hotel complex also still offers guests the option to stay on “Pilots Row” – in rooms once used by airline crews – or in one of the five replica Colonial-style homes of Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe and other famous Americans that Henry Ford had built at the inn.
Other ‘early’ airport hotels
Some of today’s travelers may remember a few other early airport hotels that are now also footnotes in history.
Memphis International housed the Skyport Inn from about 1972 until around 2012. The in-terminal hotel had about 30 rooms split between the A and C Mezzanines and was popular with pilots and flight attendants who had early morning flights. Many, if not all, of the rooms may have lacked windows: in an article about the hotel being razed to make way for office space, the Memphis Business Journal noted that each room at the Skyport Inn had its own skylight.
The Airport Mini Hotel that once operated at Honolulu International Airport closed its doors not long at 9/11. But for many years the hotel offered travelers on layovers a space to nap and freshen up for less than $10 an hour. “Apparently the rooms were small, but the bathrooms were decent,” said airport spokeswoman Claudine Kusano.
And while we now know that th sprawling Hilton that operated at San Francisco Airport from 1959 until the late 1990s was not the world’s first airport hotel (by a longshot), we do know that a night club at the hotel called Tiger A-Go-Go was quite popular with passengers, airline crew and employees.
So popular, it seems, that in 1965, the pop duo Buzz & Bucky released a single about the lounge titled (what else but) Tiger-A-Go-Go (click on the link to give it a listen) which spent four weeks on the Billboard charts.
