The Gingerbread Extravaganza – the annual line-up of holiday sweet shacks at Le Parker Meridien – is among my favorite New York hotel traditions. For the last five years, the hotel has invited local bakeries, restaurants and caterers to cook up the ultimate gingerbread creation built around a theme for display in the hotel’s mirror-lined […]
On a recent visit to The Quin hotel I came across something I’d never seen. A button on the bedside phone – remember those? – connects you instantly with a personal shopper at Bergdorf-Goodman. Should you need a new nail color or a last-minute Alaia, they can send one over (the store is steps away). […]
Eliminate poison and you wipe out much of the world’s great literature, not to mention a slew of movies, crime stories and much of the TV line-up. Consider: no Sherlock Holmes or Harry Potter, no Mad Hatter or Macbeth. No Hunger Games. And most definitely, no American Horror Story: Coven.
“Imagine that Priceline and Tablet Hotels had a baby,” says Cheryl Rosner of her baby, a new hotel booking site called Stayful that went live today. Stayful offers rooms in independent boutique hotels, like New York’s Standard High Line and the Inn on Rivington; no large chain properties are allowed.
Every decade or so, someone comes along and tweaks the way hotels look and do what they do. In the 1970s, London designer Anouska Hemphill transformed a pair of run-down South Kensington townhouses into Blakes, the template for the one-of-a-kind boutique hotel with a sumptuous, ethnic-inflected aura and rooms so exotically dressed – puddled silk […]
When Macy’s changed the route of New York’s marquee parade from Seventh to Sixth Avenue in 2012 it proved a blow to visitors who like watching Hello Kitty & Company float by from a hotel room. Seventh Avenue’s eight hotels overlooking the parade route dwarfed the five along Sixth Avenue and Central Park West, both […]
It’s no fluke that libraries are the go-to amenity at smart hotels. Books and travel go together like gin and tonic, airplanes and airports, pillows and pillowcases. 70 Park Avenue, a stylish hotel in a 1920s building south of Grand Central Station, is New York’s latest hotel to go literary but with a twist.
Big bushy beards didn’t hamper sluggers Mike Napoli, Jonny Gomes or Dustin Pedroia in this year’s World Series. But they and their Red Sox teammates would be wise to go clean shaven if they ever aspire to work the front desk at a hotel. Hotel employees sporting facial hair make a less favorable impression on […]
This was a good week for those who believe WiFi is no different from hotel basics like sheets, towels and a shower with running water and should be included free of charge in the price of a room. Mandarin Oriental announced that its hotels will offer their “exceptional” high-speed internet service on a complimentary basis. […]
The Hotel Carter, Times Square’s notorious flophouse, was in the news today once again. But this time was different. A night manager wasn’t stabbed as in 1999. A dead body wasn’t discovered under a bed as in 2007. And TripAdvisor didn’t hail the hotel one of the dirtiest in the United States, a distinction the […]