Full disclosure: I love hotel soaps and have been known to wrap up a gently used bar of Malin + Goetz or Miller Harris and take it home. But I don’t always and I’ve wondered – what happens to the hundreds of thousands of lightly used soaps and shampoos hotels collect each week? Read more
As a group, New York City hotels aren’t very green. It’s not for want of trying. Many reside in old buildings constructed long before sustainability was on the radar. Yet almost weekly you hear of advances on the green front, from baby steps to strides. Read more
Yes, the boughs of the holiday tree at the Intercontinental New York Barclay Hotel are undeniably green. But so, it turns out, are the little white lights. Read more
Once upon a time, no hotel room was complete without an ashtray. Non-smoking rooms eventually appeared and, voila, room categories were born.
Now the choices for guests booking at a small but growing number of hotels include a third category — the hypo-allergenic room, cleansed within an inch of its life of nearly all surface and air-born impurities. For the estimated one in five people afflicted with allergies or asthma, this is news worth noting.
This month Hyatt became the first hotel chain to mount a grand-scale effort to purify its rooms – at least some of them. More than 60 full-service Hyatts currently offer the brand’s new Respire Hypo-Allergenic rooms, including the Andaz Fifth Avenue, Andaz Wall Street and Grand Hyatt, whose entire 29th floor is pure Respire, in New York. Read more