Hotels

Denver Airport’s new Westin hotel

Airports, Hotels, ,

DEN KEY

I was a lucky reporter and got to stay at the Denver International Airport’s new Westin hotel on opening night.

I skipped the parties, choosing instead to work and enjoy the views of the mountains from my room and put together this story for CNBC.

Courtesy Denver Westin International Airport

Courtesy Denver Westin International Airport

Chicago O’Hare International Airport has one, and so does Detroit Metropolitan Airport and Orlando International Airport. There are also two at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, while Frankfurt Airport has three.

Now, Denver Airport has an on-site hotel too.

The 519-room Westin at Denver International Airport is open for business, with the city now joining the ranks of travel hubs that can send travelers to their destinations, or put them up for the night in style.

The city- and county-owned airport spent at least $580 million to build the hotel (Denver owns it, while Westin manages it), an adjacent public plaza and a commuter rail station that will begin operation in April.

The swooping, sleek Gensler-designed Westin is adjacent to the city’s iconic tented main terminal, which sits 25 miles from the city center. The hotel walls are all glass, and the top-story pool and fitness center offer views of the Rocky Mountains. There’s public art inside and out, a conference center, and welcoming places to eat or have a drink. At some point, an airport security checkpoint with 20 lanes will open in the building.

Westin pool

While the Denver Westin will certainly offer a convenient landing spot for business and leisure travelers, airport and city officials are confident it will be much more than that.

In fact, they’re banking on it.

These new amenities “are the first steps toward leveraging [the airport] as an economic powerhouse that will create tens of thousands of new jobs and bring more business opportunity to Metro Denver,” Mayor Michael B. Hancock said at the ribbon-cutting for the hotel’s opening.

Cities across the nation are moving to take advantage of the movement to transform airports into makeshift resorts. In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s $4 billion plan announced earlier this year for LaGuardia Airport contains an option to create a hotel.

Cuomo also announced that the empty Eero Saarinen-designed TWA terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport would be transformed into the $250 million TWA Flight Center Hotel.

Hancock told CNBC that when he joins airport officials at international marketing events “we hear that international passengers expect a quality hotel and a train connection to downtown” at the airport. “Having these things helps us compete as an airport and as a city on an international scale,” he said.

There’s another upside to having this high-profile hotel on airport property.

“Right out of the box this is going to generate money for us — nonaeronautical revenue. We estimate a million to 2 million a year starting next year,” said the airport’s CEO, Kim Day. “That helps keep the costs to air carriers low and incentivizes them to add more flights.”

A hotel (and a train station) were included in the original plans for the airport, which opened in 1995. But, over the years, attempts at getting the hotel project going were repeatedly thwarted. First, it was the downturn in air traffic after 9/11. Later, it was the economic recession, Day told CNBC.

While he’s looking forward to spending a night at what he describes as “one of the most interesting-looking hotels I’ve seen in a long time,” business travel expert Joe Brancatelli keeps wondering why it took the airport so long to make the hotel happen.

“Does Denver airport need a quality hotel? Of course it does,” said Brancatelli. “Will this one change the competitive balance of airports around the country? Absolutely not. The big win here that an important airport with a relatively large number of international flights finally has a hotel.”

Souvenir Sunday: DEN’s new Westin

Hotels, Souvenir Sunday,
Courtesy Denver Westin International Airport

Courtesy Denver Westin International Airport

The ribbon-cutting for the new Westin hotel at Denver International Airport took place Thursday, November 19 and everyone who attended received a souvenir mug that came with a nice ‘bounceback” perk’: through April 30, 2016, anyone who brings the mug to the hotel’s Sky Lounge lobby bar or the Grill and Vine restaurant is eligible for a complimentary drink with the purchase of an appetizer or entree.

DEN MUG

First night guests also received a souvenir keycard:

DEN KEY

Early look: new Westin at Denver Airport

Airports, Hotels, ,

photo by Harriet Baskas

For months, a countdown clock and a bed inside the main terminal at Denver International Airport have been reminding travelers that a new Westin hotel was under construction next door.

This Thursday, the 14-story, 519-room Westin Denver International Airport hotel finally opens.

Courtesy Denver Westin International Airport

Courtesy Denver Westin International Airport

I’ll be there on Friday for the official ribbon cutting ceremony, but stopped by on Monday for a tour while workers were rushing to ready the hotel for guests.

Photo by Harriet Baskas

Signs point to the plaza leading to the hotel and the transit station (which won’t open until April), but the doors don’t yet open.

DEN PLAZA

When the doors do open, travelers will be able to walk directly from the main terminal, across a covered plaza, to the hotel.

Part of the hotel's commissioned artwork, waving metal blades mimic the grasses of the Colorado plains.

Part of the hotel’s commissioned artwork, waving metal blades mimic the grasses of the Colorado plains.

Westin lobby

The 6th floor Sky Lobby has a Sky Lounge bar and this open seating area.

Westin pool

The 11th floor pool offers views to downtown Denver – and the mountains beyond.

Stay tuned for more photos later in the week.

Survey of hotel habits – good and bad

Etiquette, Hotels, , , ,

Wolcott Hotel Elevator Buttons

Expedia just released the results of its 2015 Hotel Etiquette Study, which asked 1,022 Americans to share tidbits about their behavior at hotels and to evaluate the behavior of other hotel guests.

67 percent said parents who let their kids run wild are the most aggravating hotel guests, 64 percent said “Hallway Hellraisers” were the most irritating, while 54 percent of Americans complained about guests who berate hotel staff over minor inconveniences.

Survey respondents were also asked about some of the things they did in hotel rooms, such as hoarding toiletries, smoking, sneaking in extra guests and taking home hotel property, but I was most intrigued by the section on tipping.

According to the survey, 51 percent of Americans tip the hotel housekeeper, but 27 percent do not tip hotel employees at all.

Crowdfunding comes to hotels

Hotels, , ,

I’ve been keeping an eye on Yotel ever since my short stay inside one of the hotel brand’s tiny short-stay “cabins” at London’s Heathrow Airport.

So I was especially interested in working on this story for CNBC about how crowdfunding is being incorporated into the fundraising plan for a Yotel to be built in San Francisco:

Yotel Room mockup, June 2010Designed by Rockwell group, NY

The online money-raising craze that made possible both the Pebble smartwatch and the Oculus Rift virtual reality system is now becoming a trend in the hotel hospitality industry.

Crowdfunding is being used to help raise funds to transform a historic building in San Francisco’s gentrifying Mid-Market neighborhood into a hip, high-tech YOTEL-branded hotel.

In a joint venture with a Kuwaiti real estate company named AQARAT, New York-based real estate investment firm, Synapse Development Group is spearheading the redevelopment of 1095 Market Street.

If all goes according to plan, the antiquated office building will soon become a 203-room hotel. It will be the city’s first hotel partly financed via crowdfunding and will be located just blocks from the headquarters of tech heavyweights Uber and Twitter.

“We thought crowdfunding a small portion [10 to 15 percent] of the equity on this deal would fit with the ethos of the neighborhood, given the demographic of the young, millennial, tech-heavy crowd that is there day-to-day,” said Justin Palmer, Synapse’s CEO.

“It’s a good way to encourage local buy-in on the project,” said Palmer. “These people can reap investment benefits as owners and also actually visit the property, go to the restaurant, the roof top bar and get owners’ discounts on room rates.”

Synapse isn’t the first company to crowdfund a hotel, however. In 2014, the Hard Rock Hotel in Palm Springs used the platform to raise $1.5 million to help refinance and renovate the property. For a minimum investment of $10,000, individuals became equity owners and received a package of VIP guest perks.

Real estate crowdfunding site RealCrowd is hosting the YOTEL San Francisco offering, which is open to accredited investors. In addition to equity ownership, investors are being offered Kickstarter-type perks, such as t-shirts, annual parties and personalized perks at investment tiers starting at a minimum of $25,000.

“They’re trying to marry the concepts from the last generation of crowdfunding, when you were just a supporter to being also an owner,” said Mitch Roschelle, partner and real estate advisory leader at PwC, “but there are a lot of complicated security laws you need to deal with.”

A lot of those security laws are still quite new, dating back to the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, which was signed into law in April 2012. That eased some fundraising and advertising restrictions for small companies.

With real estate crowdfunding growing globally, from $1 billion in 2014 to a projected $2.5 billion in 2015, Roschelle thinks it’s a growing trend — and one that makes sense for hotels.

“A lot of crowdfunding has been in the intellectual property space, for movies and start-up businesses,” said Roschelle. “It was inevitable that crowdfunding would make its way to properties where investors could visit or even stay at the very place they funded.”

According to Crowdnetic, which tracks crowd financing, since September 2013 there have been over 300 securities-based crowdfunded real estate development and investments offerings out of 6,260. Twelve of those have been for hotel properties.

Of that number, “10 … have been successful, and I would not be surprised if the early successful hotel offerings spurred other hotel and lodging properties to come on board with this still-new capital-formation tool,” said Janet Rosenblum, Crowdnetic’s director of research.

Synapse’s YOTEL underscores how the real estate industry is grappling with major changes in how to build and finance projects.

“With technology and the regulatory changes, there’s been a transformational shift in how people manage their money,” said Adam Hooper, co-founder and CEO of RealCrowd, “We’re still building a stadium and I don’t even know if the game has started yet.”

A new LaGuardia Airport? It will happen.

Airports, Architecture, Aviation history, History, Hotels,

LGA Airport

On Monday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the long-awaited plan for the promised makeover of LaGuardia Airport, which U.S. vice-president Joe Biden likened to one found in “some Third World country.”

The make-over of the airport will be massive: it will cost at least $4 billion and include one unified terminal building “designed so passengers intuitively understand the airport’s layout,” an automated tram, business and conference center capabilities, better roadways and public transportation to and from the airport, better taxiways for the airplanes, a cell phone lot, a consolidated rental car center, a boutique hotel and the services, dining and shopping options now offered by first-class airports elsewhere.

A tall order? Sure, you betcha’. But something has to be done.

Here’s a video that details the design that just might make you believe it will happen.

And here’s a link to the full report.

No mention of bringing back the Observation Deck or the Sky Bar.

LGA SKYBAR

LAG SKYBAR

Red Lion’s new Baltimore hotel helping city’s homeless

Hotels, , , , , ,

Homeless Baltimore Project Wake Up Call

Most hotels lead up to a grand opening with press releases about the glitz and glamor and amenity-rich aspects of their new property.

But as it readies for the August 1 opening of the Hotel RL Baltimore Inner Harbor – the first hotel in the new upscale Hotel RL brand – RLHC (Red Lion Hotels Corporation) is promoting a social responsibility project to help the homeless.

RLCH has partnered with Baltimore’s Health Care for the Homeless and created a fundraising campaign called Project Wake Up Call: Baltimore Uncovered.

In advance of the hotel opening in Baltimore, RLCH asked photographer Ian Tong to  go out into the city and make portraits of homeless people and their living situations.

Project Wake-Up Call

“Homelessness is an issue that affects every city in the country,” said RLHC President & CEO Greg Mount, “We’re in the shelter business, so working to combat homelessness is as an organic extension of who we are as a company and as caring, hospitable individuals.”

You can see a gallery of the photos here – and you can join the hotel in supporting Health Care for the Homeless, a Baltimore nonprofit health clinic, by donating on this site.

Donations of $100 or more will be acknowledged with a one-night stay at the hotel between August 1, 2015 – October 31, 2015.

RLHC plans to repeat the Project Wake Up Call fundraising partnership program in other cities where it plans new Hotel RL properties.

(Photos by Ian Tong; courtesy RLHC)

YO! Sushi at Copenhagen Airport

Food, Hotels, , , , ,

yo sushi copenhagen

What’s better than really fresh and really tasty sushi at the airport?

Sushi that comes to you on a conveyor belt.

YO! Sushi, the ‘running’ sushi restaurant that started in London and now has 74 restaurants worldwide, just opened a branch at Copenhagen Airport. There, the sushi moves along a 230-foot-long conveyor belt at just over 3 inches per minute – giving diners time to peruse the offerings, make a decision and pick up a dish – or wait a few seconds for something tastier-looking to come along.

Sound like fun? This entertaining dining option is also available at Edinburgh Airport and and Heathrow Airport T2 and T3.

yo sushi

The people who invented Yo! Sushi didn’t stop with restaurants. They’re also the folks behind the Yotel – the hotels located at Heathrow, Gatwick and Amerstardam airports that offer cabin-like rooms where you can relax and refresh before, after or between flights. The concept has been so popular that there’s now a Yotel in New York City and plans to open additional Yotels at Singapore Changi and Paris Charles DeGaulle Airport and addiitional off-airport Yotels on Orchard Street in Singapore, in Brooklyn, NY, San Francisco, and Miami within the next two or three years.

Travel deals for Black Friday & Cyber Monday

Air Fare Deals, Holidays, Hotels, , , ,

Home shopping but dreaming of travel? Here are some of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals that might get you going.

suitcase

AIRLINES

Air Canada has a long list of Black Friday fare specials available now through November 30.

Cathay Pacific kicks off its Black Friday fare sale on Friday at midnight EST, promising deals from all its US gateways (SFO, LAX, ORD, EWR, JFK, BOS) to Asia – plus a sweepstakes.

Alaska Airlines‘ most popular fare sale is Cyber Monday, and they’ll probably offer a preview a day before.

From now through December 2, 2014 Airberlin is offering $499 roundtrip flights (including taxes) starting from Chicago, New York and Miami to many cities in Europe for travel January 12 to March 22, 2015.

LAN and TAM have something planned for Cyber Monday and it’s likely other airlines will jump in with offers as well, so check around.

HOTELS

HotelTonight, which recently expanded its offering from day-of bookings to 7-day-in-advance deals, is offering $7 hotel rooms on Black Friday starting at 7 a.m. local time, till the available inventory sells out, which should be pretty quickly.

On Black Friday Expedia.com is offering 90% off a limited quantity of select hotels in New York, Hawaii, Las Vegas, Cancun and San Francisco. The offer will be avaiable from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. PST. Expedia will also be offering a $50 coupon off Expedia rate hotels throughout Friday, as well as some Cyber Monday deals.

Many individual hotels, as well as chains large and small, will be offering Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals as well, so if you’ve got a destination in mind, be sure to poke around for lodging deals in that city or region.

Provenance Hotels, with a portfolio of 7 highly individual properties in Portland, Seattle and Nashville, for example, is giving each hotel’s Facebook and newsletter fans 25 percent off the best available rates through March 31, 2015 as part of a Black Friday/Cyber Monday promotion. (Sign up before Friday to make sure you get the mailing.

Travel tune-up: hotel loyalty program & policy changes

Hotels, , ,

10_GLobe Trotter bespoke luggage - free with hotel room

Changes in hotel frequent stay program rules, member amenities and alliances, your own travel patterns and rising room prices makes the holiday season the right time to take inventory of potential bonuses and rewards.

A recent lodging outlook from PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) predicts that in 2015 industry-wide occupancy levels are expected to reach 64.9 percent, the highest since 1984.

That may give hotel operators more confidence to hike prices. And it may also be the trigger behind some recently announced policy changes for 2015 — most notably the decision by Hilton Worldwide to adopt a stricter cancellation policy.

Effective Jan. 1, 2015, “penalty-free cancellations” at the hotel’s properties “must be made by 11:59 p.m. local hotel time the day prior to arrival,” and not by 6 p.m. local time the day of arrival, currently the standard at most hotels.

The change is “designed to make more rooms available for travelers needing last minute accommodations,” said Jim Holthouser, Executive Vice President, Global Brands, Hilton Worldwide.

Still, the policy, which is reportedly also being adopted by Marriott International next year “is a decided negative for travelers,” said Tim Winship, editor and publisher of FrequentFlier.com. This could have implications for business travelers who often make last minute changes in their plans.

Winship and others expect other hotel companies to follow suit, so be sure to check the policy wording when you make 2015 reservations.

Beginning Jan. 15, 2015, Marriott Rewards members will get free Wi-Fi at close to 4,000 properties in the company’s portfolio. There is a catch, though: Travelers will only get the perk by making a direct booking on the hotel’s website, through its mobile app, 800-number or directly with a hotel.

This doesn’t sit well with travel agents who stand to lose customers and commissions. However, some direct-booking partnerships, like those offered through Concur’s TripLink solution, may offer a way to get the Marriott’s Wi-Fi perk while staying within corporate booking requirements.

Some hotel chains have recently added useful program perks, many of them technology-driven, with more planned for 2015:

Kimpton won’t talk yet about the changes it has in store to its loyalty program for 2015, but it did recently introduce Kimpton Karma Rewards. The program offers members perks ranging from free Wi-Fi and $10 credit for in-room snacks, to welcome amenities and complimentary upgrades.

In July, Marriott began using beacon technology to send geographically-targeted offers for food and beverage, golf, spa deals and more to Rewards members at several hotels. The LocalPerks program should be at work in a dozen Marriott properties by the end of this year, so keep an eye on your mobile devices as you wander through participating hotels.

Many hotels are now coming into the 21st century by using smartphone applications to lure in tech-savvy travelers.

Hilton announced recently that by the end of this year, guests will be able to use their mobile devices, tablets and computers to check-in, choose a room and order items delivered to their room at more than 4,000 properties worldwide.

Starting in 2015, Hilton HHonors members will be able to access their hotel rooms via mobile-key technology at all U.S. properties across four of the company’s brands, said Geraldine Calpin, senior vice president and global head of digital at Hilton Worldwide.

The HHonors app will also unlock other rooms that typically require room keys such as the fitness center, executive floors, elevators and parking facilities.

And earlier this month Starwood Hotels and Resorts rolled out SPG Keyless, at the first 10 hotels that will allow Starwood Preferred Guests to use the SPG app on their phone as a hotel room key.

Additionally, hotel loyalty programs are also expanding their partnerships with airlines.

Starwood recently announced a strategic partnership with Emirates that gives members added benefits and earnings when they stay Starwood and fly Emirates. “Other loyalty programs, like Delta/Starwood and United/Marriott have linked up as well,” says travel writer Ramsey Qubein.

“Just be sure to link you accounts via the hotel programs websites and always monitor your account to make sure stays post properly,” he added.

At the end of the travel day, “If you feel like the loyalty is going both ways then you should stick with that program,” said Brian Kelly of ThePointsGuy.com. “Many programs under-promise and over-deliver, but some programs do the opposite.”

(My story about 2015 changes in hotel loyalty programs first appeared on CNBC)