More and more hotel rooms and suites can be bid for on auction sites. Her is a link to »Luxury Links where you can place a bid on very expensive suites and rooms (or simply very up market properties). Block popups in your browser, because otherwise you get too many of those pop- eh hickups!
Category: Trends
Ipod guided city tours
I hate pottering like cattle in a mass behind a guide.
Two young entrepreneurial guys have a solution. Recently they set up a website, Audio City Tours, where, against a small fee, you can download an MP3 file, that guides your walk through Amsterdam. Two tours are available for the moment: An Old Amsterdam Tour and a Rembrandt Tour.
A Salzburg Mozart Tour is in preparation. They have to be fast with their Mozart tours, as the Austrian site Calling Mozart [url deleted as the site dissappeared since, ed.], set up by the Austrian State Radio ORF, provides a series of free tours in Vienna along various points of interest connected with Mozart.
In the UK it exists already under the name Tourist Tracks with tours in Bath, Brighton, Cambridge, London en Oxford. I also found one for Gloucestershire [url deleted as the site dissappeared since, ed.].
Update: They closed in the meantime.
Last Update January 2017
Hotelroom + Cabrio
Marketing of Hotel Queen in Dutch Waalwijk is effectively handled by Femke Heinrich, a charming 28 yr old member of the very well known Dutch Van der Valk clan of Hoteliers. She created the BMW Special One or two nights stay in the hotel combined with the use of a BMW cabrio.
Dutch ladies who want to surprise their alter ego – or want to be surprised by their alter ego who regularly tend to forget to do so – love it! Reservations are never to be confirmed at the home addresses….
Update: Since posting Hotel Queen was acquired by NH Hoteles.
Last edited by gje on December 14, 2016.
Starwoods’ acquisition of Le Meridien completed
A Pressrelease of November 24, 2005 announced that the acquisition of the label Le Meridien was completed for approximately $ 225 mio by Starwood Hotels & Resorts.
Contrary to my guessing Le Meridien will continue to operate as Starwoods 8th label in addition to the seven already existing labels:
- Starwood,
- Sheraton,
- Four Points,
- The Luxury Collection,
- W Hotels,
- Westin, and the top label
- St Regis,
The 130 properties of Le Meridien were for the major part contributed to a joint venture of Starwood en Lehman, by the name of Starwood Capital Group LLC, which also paricipates in, for instance, Taittinger champagne.
Recently Starwood Hotels & Resorts itself divested 38 properties for approximately $ 4,1 billion by selling them to Host Marriott.
Host Marriot is the property investment vehicle (with R.E.I.T. status) that resulted from splitting up the Marriott group of companies in a property vehicle and a managment vehicle after Marriott senior died. Probably the heirs needed some cash to satisfy the taxcollector. In addition some heirs were not interested in continuing Marriott and others are, as is usual in family owned business.
For the small business mind of Happy Hotelier it is always mindboggling to see the enourmous amounts involved with the property transactions and also seeing Starwood with a loyalty program of more than 24 mio preferred guests acquire in a nutshell the management of 130 hotels with more than 25.000 employees, who, for the record, will be employed by the owners of the properties and some of who probably will have to find other employment.
The Le Meridien Group that was originally set up by aircarrier Air France (like the GoldenTulip label was set up by KLM) is not French anymore… although its headquarters was already in Londen….
More about this acquisition at the Starwood site.
Hotel Reviews – Travel Intelligence
More and more people tend to book via Internet and more and more word of mouth will help the lonely traveler behind the computer screen to get an idea of where he might go.
Therefor sites with more or less independent hotel reviews will attract more and more attention.
The site Weekend Hotel takes care of this with respect to smaller independent hotels in The etherlands and Belgium.
Hoteldesign (UK) was created by Patrick Goff, who had a lot of experience with hotel design. The site is financed by ads from hotel suppliers and provides a lot of useful content by extensive reporting of various hotels and their design.
Update August 2016:
Patrick Goff has sold his site. It is more or less the same, but many reviews have disappeared from the site since.
Travel intelligence used to be a site with a heap of professionally written hotel reviews. It was very reliable and it is a pity that it has lost this in the internet dungeons when it was sold to (I don’t know, but you end up in a site of travel zoo, which seems to be what its name indicates: A Zoo.