The Happier the Hotelier, The Happier the Guest
When I noticed 5 Star Luxury Hotels Blog I thought: “A star is Born, just what I missed: An easy to access repository of 5 Star Luxury Hotels”.
David J. Ourisman of Travel Horizons started this Blog somewhere in May 2007.
Update: and barely a year after this post David stopped posting…..
Oops and I thought he was from Down Under, but actually he is from the US.
Enjoy!
Update:
Unfortunalely, barely a year after this post David stopped posting…
Last edited by GJE on April 19, 2011 at 11:49 pm
Pehac, Pan-European Hotel Acquisition Company N.V., is a blank check company recently formed under the laws of the Netherlands as a public company with limited liability (naamloze vennootschap or N.V.) to serve as a vehicle for an acquisition of one or more operating businesses in the hotel industry in Europe. It is AEX listed since spring 2007.
According to a press release dated 16nd November 2007:
PEHAC announced today that it has signed a stock purchase agreement with sellers Lehwood Vienna GMBH, Starman Deutschland Holdings GMBH and Lehwood Netherlands Holdings B.V. to acquire a freehold interest in Le Meridien Grand Hotel Nuremberg and leasehold interests in six additional hotels, including Le Meridien Park Hotel Frankfurt, Le Royal Meridien Hamburg, Le Meridien Stuttgart, Le Meridien Munich, Le Meridien Vienna and Le Meridien Hotel Des Indes in The Hague. Further, PEHAC announced that it is in final negotiations regarding the proposed acquisition of a leasehold interest in Le Meridien Barcelona, a 229-room hotel, from Starman Hoteles Espana. Assuming the successful completion of each of these transactions, these hotels will continue to operate under a license and management agreement with Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide Inc.
PEHAC believes that this combination of acquisitions offers a rare opportunity to acquire a platform of high-quality hotel properties in key-European cities, enabling it to pursue a successful buy- and build strategy.
The portfolio, excluding Le Meridien Barcelona, represents an aggregate of 1,819 hotel rooms and is expected, based on performance year-to-date, to generate approximately €102 million in revenues in 2007. Under the terms of the stock purchase agreement, the total purchase price, excluding Le Meridien Barcelona, will be € 49.25 million, and is expected to be closed in cash, without the use of debt financing. PEHAC will commit to spend an additional € 10 million for necessary capital expenditures, which amount is expected to be used primarily for the refurbishment of the freehold property in Nuremberg. Each of the other hotels subject to the stock purchase agreement as well as the Barcelona property have been extensively renovated in recent years.
Based on operating results in 2007 and estimates it believes to be reasonable for the coming year, PEHAC expects the portfolio of hotels, excluding Le Meridien Barcelona, to achieve approximately € 8.0 million in earnings before interest, depreciation and amortization, or EBITDA, in 2008.
Given the high-quality assets in the portfolio, and assuming the successful implementation of a pro-active asset, property and project management strategy and the continued implementation of Starwood’s respected management system and favorable market conditions, PEHAC believes that there is significant potential for further operating improvements for the portfolio.
Well…what will happen with the name now?
Olga and her Brother Rocco Forte
This post, mainly about Olga, has been on the backburner for quite some time, as I had misplaced an interview with Olga Polizzi on my computer, but found it back recently.
The interview is by Locum’s managing director James Alexander and Locum’s non-executive director Tony Hodges for Locum Destination Review, a publication of Locum Consulting. It appears the interview can stil be easily found at Locum’s website under the title Olga Polizzi, an eye for individuality.
I’ll start with Olga
Olga Polizzi is a hotel investor, a hotel designer and a hotel proprietor: A real Hotelier.
She is the daughter of famous hotelier Lord Forte. She was married to Count Alessandro Polizzi, an Italian marquess who died in a racing-car accident in 1980, leaving her to bring up her two daughters – then six and four -on her own. For 16 years she was responsible for building and design within his eponymous chain that I remember as Trusthouse Forte long before Granada raided it. More recently, Olga has been a co-investor and again responsible for design in the mini-chain being driven by her brother, Sir Rocco Forte. Finally, she is a hotel proprietor of Hotel Tresanton in St Mawes, Cornwall.
The William part
of this post is William Shawcross, according to his Profile born 28 May 1946 in Sussex, raised at Eton and Oxford. Son of Baron Shawcross. Married to Olga Polizzi, his third wife and her second husband. According to his own website William Shawcross
is an internationally renowned writer and broadcaster. As well as being the author of several highly acclaimed books on subjects as wide-ranging as the Shah of Iran and Rupert Murdoch, he appears regularly on television and radio. His articles have appeared in leading newspapers and journals throughout the world.
His profile, basically by Ed Vulliamy and published Sunday July 13, 2003 in The Observer notes:
William the conqueror (which heading inspired me to the title of this post)
As a radical young writer, he took on the US establishment over Vietnam. Now he counts American hawks as friends and has been appointed biographer to the Queen Mother. What will he do with the House of Windsor’s secrets?……
Marriage to Olga Polizzi, Shawcross’s partner in the ownership and management of the Hotel Tresanton, gave Shawcross the surroundings he needed to both ‘gaze at the sea’ and pen his treatment for last year’s BBC series Queen and Country. It was three years in the making and denounced as ‘sycophantic and fawning’ to the Crown, but it became the collateral for his forthcoming book.
The marriage put the couple at the epicentre of Establishment entertaining: Prince Charles and Shawcross’s old friend Camilla Parker Bowles (her father was a friend of Sir Hartley) are regular guests.
And it enabled the author of Sideshow to attain what he says, as a supposed joke, is his aim in life: to be ‘a Basil Fawlty to my wife – one who writes a bit’.
From the Locum interview
I noted some interesting thoughts of Olga:
She likes:
because the hotelier wants to distinguish the hotel from the one next door and make it more popular. And then the guest comes in and sees something different and likes it.
Service is 70 per cent of it, really. Service is incredibly important, how you are greeted, hot water, is it friendly?, telephone calls ….’ Despite the new sophistication of the seasoned traveller, ‘we are still the same humans we always were … mainly we want comfort, good food, good service … you’re just playing around with the elements a bit.’
I like going somewhere really brilliant and new … I’ll notice the door handles … but most people, you ask them what colour the room was and they won’t remember … it’s just a feeling, it’s everything in its right place, everything really comfortable.
We are quite careful and budget-conscious. I can’t bear it when I see something like Sandy Lane where they’ve spent £80 million on it. We’re in there to make money and cannot spend that sort of money.
When I first opened it, the accountant down there said “You can”t make money on a hotel in Cornwall”, but I said “I haven’t put all this effort and money in not to make money, we’re going to make money”. Actually, we are doing incredibly well. This is my fourth year …. I broke even from the first year …
She dislikes:
The Designer hotel – a designer hotel doesn’t look at comfort … it’s so often done too cheaply, everything breaks, you take a shower and the water pours out into the room, all the little things that drive you completely mad … design is not for its own sake.
She admits that she is in demand. Practically every day I get someone writing to me. What colour paint is this in the room? Where did you get this bedspread or this material? Where do you get your handles, your basins, your baths? It’s extraordinary … someone came the other day and they’ve called their house Tresanton, she trills. Yet down in the family’s gift and fashion boutique in St Mawes – ONDA – for all the well-cut clothes and Tresanton iconography on towels and lavender sachets, and the £50 umbrella and £5 soap, there is no sense that Olga Polizzi is taking her potential brand strengths seriously enough. She should. She is a talented individual with a rare eye and a fine business brain. And she has something that ordinary mortals understandably envy. In all innocence, she defines this something simply and memorably when discussing good food and good design. It’s true of both, design and food. There is a connection. It’s good taste at the end of the day. Precisely so, Mrs Polizzi. Now why not share your taste with a wider audience? Heroes make good brand stories, but so do heroines.
A Telegraph article In Pollizi Custody describes her next project: The acquisition of the Grade I-listed Endsleigh House on Dartmoor and refurbishment into a five star hotel.
In another Telegraph interview aptly titled Perfection is her Forte
“I’m completely obsessive-compulsive. I can never talk to anybody if a crooked painting catches my eye. And I tell myself, ‘Olga, do shut up,’ but I can’t help it. When I used to go to other hotels with my daughters [Alexandra, 33, and Charlotte, 31], I would be straightening all the furniture and they would say, ‘Ma, this isn’t your hotel.’ “
Wow! What a designer!
Update:
I found the photo at another worthwhile interview with her last year over at the Artisans of Leisure Travel Blog
Today and tomorrow 27 ministers of defense meet “informally” in Noorwijk, just a couple of miles North East from The Hague.
According to the Nato site they will
discuss the way ahead for NATO’s operations and Alliance transformation.
The ministers will discuss ways to ensure that the NATO-led operations in Afghanistan and Kosovo remain correctly configured and properly resourced.They will also consider NATO’s role in Afghanistan as part of the wider efforts of the international community to support the development of national security, governance and development in Afghanistan.
They will also address the continued transformation of NATO’s defense capabilities and how best to continue ensuring the availability of forces and capabilities for the Alliance’s operations and for the NATO Response Force.
In the informal meeting of the NATO-Russia Council, the 27 Ministers will address civil and military activities, as well as cooperation in Afghanistan and in the framework of NATO’s counter terrorism operation in the Mediterranean, Active Endeavor.
In order to make the meeting as secure as possible luxurious Grand Hotel Huis ter Duin has been fenced off from the outside world and looks like a military fort. Its premises and the complete town of Noordwijk have been declared temporary military zone. Without due form of process anybody can be searched and moved away from the area. A Dutch Marine minesweeper is anchored in front of the seashore located hotel and secures the seaside. Airplanes heading for Schiphol Amsterdam Airport have to make a detour as the area is declared a no flight zone as well and Noordwijk is just located in one of the frequently used approaches for the airport.
I am not sure the Huis ter Duin Hotelier is really very happy with this prestigious venue.
From the roof of the Leipzig Gallery of Contemporary Art the one room (one suite) Hotel Everland has moved to the roof of the Paris Palais de Tokyo where it will receive guests for an overnight stay and museum visitors during the day until the end of 2008.
In an interview with the Australian News Com Swiss artists Sabina Lang who with Daniel Baumann forms the duo “L/B” that created the artsy Hotel concept, commented:
“It’s what we thought of as an ideal hotel room,” Ms Lang said as she watched a giant crane being prepared to winch the prefabricated green unit up from the back of a truck.
Hotel Everland, originally conceived for Expo 2002, has already spent 18 months at the Gallery for Contemporary Art in Leipzig. But the view from the Palais de Tokyo, incorporating the Paris skyline and the Eiffel Tower, is of a different kind from the east German tower block guests saw there.
“You shouldn’t need a television,” Ms Lang said.
She said it was important for the work to be an actual hotel as well as a part of the museum. Guests pay Euro 333.- (currently $526.86) a night during the week and Euro 444.- (currently $702.48) at weekends, a comparable rate to other hotels in the chic 16th arrondissement, with charges used to cover running costs.
Guests book online at the Hotel Everland site but stay only for the night after closure of the museum. During the day, the room can be inspected by museum visitors.
Reservations, which opened at the start of October, have been brisk and the first two months are already booked out. But the two artists have not been tempted to change trades and abandon art for the hospitality industry.
“It’s absurd to have a one-room hotel and it’s never going to be a success as a business plan,” Ms Lang said. “We just like to play around with the idea of exclusivity and luxury.”