Category: Luxury

Munich: The Charles, Rocco Forte's third German Hotel to open October 4, 2007

The Charles Hotel

From the Press Release:

The Rocco Forte Collection is delighted to announce that its Munich property will open on 4 October 2007. It will be called The Charles Hotel, in honor of Sir Rocco Forte’s father, renowned hotelier Lord Charles Forte.

The Charles Hotel is The Rocco Forte Collection’s third German property, joining Hotel de Rome in Berlin (which opened in October 2006) and Villa Kennedy in Frankfurt (which opened in March 2006), and confirms The Rocco Forte Collection as the key player in the luxury hotel market in Germany.

Located in the heart of the Bavarian city of Munich, guests of The Charles Hotel will be guaranteed a peaceful stay with great views over the area known as Lenbach Gärten (which lies on the edge of the Botanical Gardens). Ideal for business and leisure travelers, the hotel is within walking distance of the commercial district, popular shopping areas and entertainment facilities. It is also well located for transport links, being close to the city’s main train station, The Hauptbahnhof, with the Franz Josef Strauss airport lying just 28 km northeast of Munich.

A stylish new-build, The Charles Hotel is set to significantly raise the standard of visitor accommodation in Munich. The design has been overseen by The Rocco Forte Collection’s Director of Design, Olga Polizzi, and – as with all the other properties in the Collection – will have its own personality that reflects its location.

For example, there will be Bavarian limestone on the floors, ceramic artwork from Nymphenburg porcelain in the bathrooms and original paintings by Munich’s celebrated 19th century portrait artist Franz von Lenbach in the bedrooms, alongside works by contemporary artists living and working in and around Munich.

The eight-story, Euros 71.5 million hotel will have 132 40-square-meters rooms, nine Junior Suites (measuring 48 square meters each), 18 Master Suites (70 square meters) and a Presidential Suite (100 square meters). Located on the eighth floor, the stunning Presidential Suite boasts a large terrace with breathtaking views over the city and can be combined with a further three suites, creating an entire private floor of 455 square meters. Virtually all the rooms have views over the Botanical Gardens.

The hotel also comprises an Italian restaurant with floor to ceiling windows overlooking the Botanical Gardens, a terrace for outdoors dining in the summer months and a private dining room; a bar; seven conference rooms equipped with state-of-the-art technology and all benefiting from natural light; a ballroom accommodating up to 400 guests for a drinks reception; and a large spa with sauna, 15-meter swimming pool, five treatment rooms offering a range of wellness and beauty treatments and a gym with all the latest cardiovascular machinery.

Once in operation, The Charles Hotel will provide the same attention to detail, exceptional levels of comfort and personal service for which The Rocco Forte Collection has become so well known.

Perfect Escapes and The Suite Life Blog

The Suite Life

Perfect Escapes is a site with a collection of luxury hotels I can live with as afficianado. Today I found out they even have their own Blog called The Suite Life Blog which I have added to my T-List and L-List. Enjoy reading!

Update:

Either it is a hosting problem, or they really discontinued…links are not working…

Last edited by GJE on November 24, 2011 at 4:35 pm

Paris: Dinner of the 16 Chefs in Palais de Versailles or Black and White Ball?

Versailles
Palais de Versailles

Dinner?
On September 17 there will be another Epicurean happening: The US $ 30,000.- pp Dinner of the Chefs. A gastronomic experience, bringing together 38 Michelin stars (16 three stars donated chefs) in the Palais de Versaille.

On arrival at the airport in Paris, the sixty guests will be shuttled in their own limousine to their luxury hotel, where they will stay for the night of September 17.

Madame Giscard d’Estaing herself is to host the venue.

Philippe Model will decorate the venue.

A special Chopin recital will be performed in the Pavillon Français by the esteemed pianist Princess Caroline Murat- Haffner and by another young virtuoso Jack Liebeck, from the Purcell School of Music in London.

The dinner will take place in the banquet hall of Le Grand Trianon, Louis XIV’s private rooms, and will count fifteen courses, served by sixteen of the world’s most renowned Chefs. Each will be explaining their own creations, giving a unique insight into the gastronomic processes from source to table.

The net profit of this special event will be donated to the Fondation pour l’Enfance (child Foundation), which aims to combat child abuse.

Or the October 8, 2007 Black and White Ball?

Black and White Ball Fondation-Enfance.jpg

If the dinner is a bit to expensive for you, you can opt for a Euro 1,200.- invitation for the Black & White Ball in the Orangerie of Palais de Versailles, celebrating the 15th International Evening for Children and the 30th anniversary of the same Fondation pour l’Enfance (Child Foundation) and also hosted by madame Giscard d’Estaing.

Happy Hotelier banned from Facebook?

Your account has been disabled by an administrator. Please contact disabled@facebook.com from your login email for more information.

That is the message I get on my login page after I have invited a couple of fellow members of the T-List group on Facebook (Facebook | T-List Group) as friends. I really don’t know what I did wrong. Did I invite too many fellow T-Listers in one session? If that is the case, it would be helpful if one got a warning in the inviting process, such as MyBlogLog does by simply indicating that you are linking to too many persons for the day after they had to limit the daily hooking up to a maximum of 20 because frequent hooking up generated too much traffic on their site. I didn’t keep count of the number of invites I sent, but it were maybe 12 or 15 invites, on a total number of group members of not more that 35 or 38 and several members are (or better said maybe “were”) on my Friends list already.

I have send an e-mail inquiry as suggested, even two, but am getting nothing else back than an automatic reply that they “are looking into it and will answer as soon as possible”.

Thereafter I noted several times that the site was not approachable. Are they facing capacity problems or are they maybe subject to a hackers attack and trying to plug the holes? I can imagine that, like credit card companies, Facebook has tons of information that hackers would drivel about. There are already some rumors in the Blog community that the information Facebook collects makes it very vulnerable for identity theft.

By this action Facebook has definitely sunken on my radar and on my list of possible platforms for building a T-List and a L-List Community. Isn’t that what communities are about: Linking with as much as possible people with the same passion?

Post Alia (added August 3, 2007)

Facebook reinstated me yesterday and explained that a Facebook user is not allowed to send the same text several times as such could be construed as spam…..that is exactly what I did with several invites. No warning was given, at least not noticed by me. The site was on and off, so maybe that caused the problem of not showing the warning. Sending several invites without text is not considered as spam. I still don’t get it…..

T-List and L-List: The Next Step: Community Building!

Time for an update on the T-List and the L-List:

First some history:

  • On March 2, 2007 the T-List was launched by Quebec (CAN) based Mathieu Ouellet of Radaron who modeled it after the Z List, originally launched by Mack Collier of Viral garden.

    Mathieu now states in a response to Leeds (UK) based Darren Cronian’s provocative and funny The Death of The T-List:

    I’ve created the T-List for fun and also to see the impact it could have in the tourism&travel bloggers environment.

    If you take a look at my own blog, you’ll see that I talked about the T-List only once since it started. Exactly the same number of times you did. I’m not the hardest defender of the T-list. haha ; )

    I’m bored of the T-List itself but if there is something to remember from it, it’s that there are a lot of tourism & travel bloggers which would like to connect with each other. Is it good or bad? I don’t think there is something bad doing that. I don’t have personally any particular plan about it but I guess that some people do. Good for them.

    I found some interesting blogs/people with it so I’m totally happy 😉

  • Shortly thereafter. on March 7, 2007 Lake District (UK) based Paul Johnson of A Luxury Travel Blog launched the L-List, modeled after the T-List.
  • I have since tried to keep a tab on the development of both lists on my Happy Hotelier deli.icio.us driven page T-List and L-List. Currently I count 185 Blogs on the T-List an 49 Blogs on the L-List.
  • On June 14, 2007 after a quiet period, London (UK) based Kevin May of The Travolution Blog revives the T-List with his post Revisiting the T-List.
  • On June 16, 2007 Keith of Tripcart reorganizes the T-List with his post The T-List Reloaded and presents it in a nice way (a lot of work!).
  • On June 27, 2007 Scott Rains of The Rolling Rains Report copies and pastes this reorganized T-List in his post TripCart Spotlights the T-List.
  • On July 11, 2007 Intermundial shows us The T-List Reloaded.
  • On July 17, 2007 Darren Cronian posts his The Death of the T-List.
  • Also on July 17, 2007 London (UK) based Guillaume Thevenot of Hotel Blogs 2.0 posts a reply in another tongue in cheek post: Battle of the Blogs regarding the T-List.

Sofar the T-List history part and now the community building part of some T-Listers:

  • Barcelona Based Albert Barra had set up Travel in Blogs. I noted this here in my post Travel in Blogs: A new Travel community? and showed some scepsis. Albert replied correctly to my sceptical questions:

    Hello all,
    I’m Albert Barra, I have been reading all comments and articles regarding my blog and TravelinBlogs.com and decided to post to clarify your concerns.

    TravelinBlogs is an idea that came up between me and other bloggers some time ago. It was an idea that was created time ago when we noticed that there were very few interesting blogs about tourism, travel and Hospitality, and we considered it would be a good idea to put them all together or just listing them would be fine.

    The original project was called thBlogs.com and we started with it by posting manually those articles we liked. It has never been an interest on making business out of it.

    Danay, who is actually my wife, runs the site, and the admin user you mentioned is here. There is no machine thing at TravelinBlogs, but just RSS syndication of those blogs we like, and yours is one of them.

    Then came the T-list and we discovered new blogs. Some of them posted about TiB, and traffic increased fast.

    We still understand that having a Digg like project for the Travel and Hospitality would be of interest not just for the readers, but also for the bloggers as it allow them to get noticed and get extra traffic.

    Regarding your concerns about the reason why there are also categories in Spanish, the answer is quite simple, my blog which is considered of the best Spanish hospitality ones is in Spanish. There are also excellent Spanish blogs that deserve being promoted,and we post their articles at the site manually. Since then they are getting new readers from Germany that understand Spanish, and had no idea that those blogs existed. And last, our idea was also creating categories in German where there are also fantastic blogs, and French, but we are not so fluent in those languages to translate the categories.

    I hope I have clarified some of your concerns. You are welcome to visit the site.

    Albert Barra

    I joined the site and rummaged around. Look for yourself to see who from the T-List is also rummaging around. Thus far there is not a lot of communication going on between the contributors.

  • The Beta launch of VibeAgent, who by the way finalized an angel seed round today, also drew some T-Listers as beta testers which resulted in some contacts between them.
  • Then Vancouver Based Chris Clarke, also known as Chrispitality from his Blog Crispitality media Blog, a hotel industry blogger on Vacant Ready who earlier had set up the hilarious site Bed Jump Com as a stand alone which he later syndicated with Hotels by City, launched Hospitality Wiki as an experiment. He couldn’t find a relevant, interesting hospitality-specific online wiki anywhere, so he has created one and asks to participate! You will find some t-Listers there as well. Have a look.
    As a side note: have a look at this bed jumping project mentioned on Worldhum
  • There is another T-Lister who is setting up a T-List aggregator, but I lost the URL. When I find it I will fill it in here.
  • On July 4, 2007 Eric Daams (AKA Dr Pepper), A young Dutchman, living Down Under, who contributes with his brother Peter Daams who also lives Down Under, and with a third Dutchman, probably their oldest brother, Sam Daams (AKA Sam I am), who lives in Norway, to the Blog From the Swiveling Chair from the Travelerspoint travel community a post 12 Blogs I Like.
    Actually the format of this post gives me a great idea! Suppose each T-Lister posts about the 5 best posts he has seen on T-List blogs in the past week, or the past month. Then you get some real synergie! Then you really start building a community!
  • Then, on July 15, 2007 Vancouver (BC) based Jens Traenhart of the Tourism Internet Marketing Blog proposes in an excellent post T-List on Facebook to the T-Listers to join the Facebook | T-List Group. Currently there are 34 members. Have a look!
  • Finally: Off course Paul Johnson couldn’t stay behind and created via The L-List on Facebook the Facebook | L-List Community, currently with 8 members

So those are exciting developments and give plenty a possibility to building T-List and L-List communities. The only question is: which forum will prevail in a couple of months?

Note:
In researching one and another I added some details after the publication date.

Last edited by GJE on December 6, 2011 at 8:38 am