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Bulgari hotel for London next year
The Bulgari Hotels and Resorts company, which already operates properties in Milan and Bali, confirmed earlier this month that its new property will open in 2012 in the exclusive London district of Knightsbridge. It will offer 85 rooms and suites, including seven Bulgari suits which measure over 200 sq. meters, and will be designed with silver as the dominant theme by Antonio Citterio, Patricia Viel & Partners, the company behind Bulgari’s other two hotels. Guests will be able to enjoy a dip in an indoor pool, part of a 2,000 square meter spa and fitness center, as well as relaxing in the hotel’s private cinema or dancing the night away in a ballroom.
As London becomes an increasingly popular luxury hotspot among visitors from Russia and the Middle East, the number of top-end hospitality firms looking to set up shop there has steadily grown. By the end of next year, London will also boast new properties from ME by Sol Melia, Shangri-La and Alrov, along with the recently opened W London and newly refurbished The Savoy.
Canada’s coolest hotel warms hearts
Guests huddle for warmth in sleeping bags on beds of ice, bonnets pulled over their ears to prevent frostbite, while sipping cocktails in glasses also made of ice. This winter wonderland on the outskirts of Quebec City has become one of Canada’s hottest attractions and most sought out accommodations.
A cool place to host a memorable wedding or for a romantic getaway, the Quebec Ice Hotel has attracted 600,000 curious tourists, including 30,000 who stayed overnight, since opening seasonally 11 years ago. Like Victoria and Jeremy Martin, dozens of couples will exchange vows this winter in a temporary chapel adjacent to the hotel, sculpted entirely from blocks of ice with pews covered in furs.
“There’s something I like more than being a little bit chilly … it’s (cuddling up for warmth) with somebody you love,” says Victoria, sporting a fur hat, visiting with her fiance from the northeastern US state of Massachusetts. Average temperatures fall below minus 20 degrees C (minus four F) in winter, but inside the hotel’s 36 rooms it is relatively cozy.
Thick walls of packed snow and ice act as an insulator, trapping body heat inside. It is a building method conceived by Inuit who built igloos in the Canadian Arctic and Greenland out of blocks of snow in the winter. First-time guests of the hotel, however, are recommended to stay only one night as sleeping in sub-zero temperatures is not very refreshing.
Luxury chain Kerry Hotels debuts in Shanghai
Kerry Hotels is a new five-star contemporary brand from Shangri-La which provides “a seamless link between business, entertainment and recreation.” The new Shanghai Pudong property offers 574 guestrooms decked out with the latest technology such as DVD players, Nespresso machines, iPod docking stations and 40-inch televisions. As one would expect from a luxury brand, round-the-clock butler service is available on the seven floors of club-class accommodation, although the new dining/ entertainment concept developed by Stickman Tribe is likely to be of more interest.
Here, the hotel’s dining experience is broken down into three sections “” the COOK, MEET and BREW “” with COOK offering arguably the most impressive experience in the form of 11 live show kitchens cooking a panoply of Asian cuisine for an la carte restaurant that seats 365 people. The BREW, a contemporary pub with views of Shanghai’s Century Park, is centred around enormous three-storey steel brewing vats which stretch up to the MEET, a steakhouse set to open in April.
Clearly not a brand that intends to do things by halves, the Kerry Shanghai is also home to Shanghai’s largest hotel sports club, the 6,000 square meter, three-floor Kerry Sports, which offers everything from spinning classes to a children’s fantasy playground and a Chinese day spa also set to open in April. The next Kerry Hotel is scheduled to open in Beijing next year, although a spokesperson for Shangri-La told Relaxnews that Kerry is “definitely a global brand,” so it may not be too long before a new property opens up outside of Shangri-La’s traditional Asian stomping ground.
Half Million Hotel Rooms Getting Starbucks Coffee
Starbucks Corp. announced this week that it will be providing single-serve coffee to half a million hotels across the US. The latest deal will see Starbucks coffee delivered via Courtesy Products’ CVI one-cup brewing machine systems in 500,000 luxury hotels.
Starbucks has been making a string of announcements in the last few weeks indicating a strong interest in expanding their reach into the one-cup brewing market, currently dominated by machine-makers Keurig and Tassimo in the US. Their VIA line targets people on the go with single-serve instant coffee packets.
The Ritz-Carlton, Toronto Opens Today
Ritz-Carlton has opened its latest hotel in the Canadian city of Toronto, adding another high-rise property to the city’s booming luxury market. The 267-room property rises 53 storeys into the Toronto skyline, within walking distance of the city’s other landmarks such as the CN Tower, the Design Exchange and the Toronto Centre for the Arts. It promises a minimum room size of 450 square feet (42 square meters), one of the largest in Toronto, although the enormous Ritz-Carlton Suite on the 20th floor is 2,415 square feet (nearly 200 square meters) and offers a view of Lake Ontario.
W Hotels debuts on London’s Leicester Square
W Hotels opened its 40th hotel and new flagship in London February 14, bringing the brand’s design-led luxury to the colorful streets of Soho. The 192-room property stands ten stories tall above the city’s famous Leicester Square and is covered in translucent glass which changes color according to the time of day and the ambience of the area. The new landmark is designed to establish Starwood’s W Hotels as a truly international luxury design hotel chain.
Boutique hotel proposed for JFK airport
The TWA Flight Center at JFK International, which has been closed since 2001, is being touted by its owners as the potential centrepiece for a “small, high-end hotel”. The building, designed by Eero Saarinen, is built in a striking shape reminiscent of bird wings and is considered both a historic and architectural landmark. Although it now serves as an entrance for Jetblue’s T5, an adjoining multimillion dollar terminal opened in 2009, most of the original building remains empty, despite a huge restoration project to make it safer and more attractive for developers.
According to sources, any hotel housed in the building would be able to offer some “considerable cultural cachet,” although the building’s landmark status means that a hotel would need to be built around the terminal, rather than vice versa. Any property would be a “niche-market boutique-style hotel with about 150 rooms,” the WSJ quoted a Port Authority of New York spokesperson as saying.
If a developer chooses to take on the project, it could give New York a world-class conversion to compete with lavish redevelopments such as the forthcoming Renaissance St Pancras hotel in London (converted from the former station and hotel), the recently-opened Shangri-La Paris (a former palace of Napoleon’s grandnephew) and the Four Seasons Gresham Palace in Budapest.
The Beachfront Club beachfront hotel finder
Some hotel operators get away with making outrageous claims regarding proximity to the beach, and although online tools such as TripAdvisor and Google Earth’s satellite imaging have made fact-checking easier, that five-minute walk to the sand is still a nasty sting for plenty of vacationers. Enter The Beachfront Club, a new hotel resource which aims to end this uncertainty by obtaining verified data on how far hotels are from the nearest stretch of sand “” and listing only those who are nearly right on top of it. The site is founded by former travel photographer John Everingham, who says that after years perfecting the art of “flattening” a picture and making roads disappear for magazine photos, he’s had a change of heart.
“While I no longer do hotel photo shoots, a quick glance through hotel websites shows that the retouching business is alive and brighter than ever; as is the sly habit of omission, as is the liberal use of the word “beachfront’ by hotels that are on the wrong side of a road, or worse,” he says on the website. “The Beachfront Club promises to help millions of people avoid the many pitfalls in discovering true beachfront hotels. I’m hoping it will be many times more than the number of people my photographs may have once helped dupe.” Guests can search by country and city, with over 8,000 properties currently listed, each with a description of the exact sand and position on the beachfront.
Armani denies plans for luxury hotel in Russia
Italian fashion designer Giorgio Armani categorically denies press reports that the luxury hotel brand is planning to develop a hotel in Russia’s Caucasus region. “The Armani Group categorically states that reports of its intention to open an Armani Hotel in the Russian Caucasus are without foundation,” the Italian group said. At the end of January, Russia’s Kommersant daily cited sources who claimed the Armani Hotels and Resorts brand was to open a hotel in the Stavropol region’s mineral springs resort area, together with other investors.
Investment in the project was estimated at over 150 million dollars (109 million euros), the report said. The Armani group opened its first 160-room luxury hotel in April in 2010 in Dubai in the highest tower in the world, Burj Khalifa, and plans to open similar developments in other countries.
Virgin Hotels ‘at least two years away’
Sir Richard Branson has said that his much-anticipated new hotel brand Virgin Hotels is still two years away from launching. San Diego and Washington DC are likely candidates, and Branson also announced that one of the the first sites will be in New Mexico, overlooking the spaceport which will send his Virgin Galactic tourist flights into space.
The luxury hotel brand is set to open its first properties outside of the US in the coming months “” the Trump Ocean Club Panama and the Trump International Hotel & Tower Toronto are both expected in the spring. The hotels, which will be added to the five-star portfolio of properties in New York, Las Vegas and Chicago, are built to the exacting standards of Donald and his daughter Ivanka and are both record breakers.
The Panama property is the tallest and largest building in Latin America and the Toronto hotel the tallest residential building in Canada.
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