She’s the long-time mascot of the Algonquin Hotel, the coolest hotel cat in town. But when we stopped by the hotel yesterday, the only Matilda we saw was this drink – a golden $20 concoction of tangerine vodka, Cointreau, fresh lemon and orange juices and Korbel Brut named for the Algonquin’s fabled feline. Read more
Hotel Americano — one of the year’s new hotels.
It isn’t just our imagination that a new hotel opens in New York almost every week. This week Major Michael R. Bloomberg announced that by the time 2011 departs New York City’s hotel room tally will reach 90,000 – a 24 percent increase over 2006. Read more
Congress can’t agree on much. But a new piece of legislation regarding hotels could bring the two sides together at least momentarily. Read more
The name has changed and so has the lobby. What was originally the Mondrian SoHo is now the NoMo SoHo, which sounds like baby talk to us but never mind. In the intervening years, the lobby has grown sleeker and simpler. Appealing, in other words, but but not as fanciful. Here’s what we saw in 2011. Read more
The new Hyatt 48Lex is a small, upscale hotel that offers guests everything you’d expect, from a restaurant and room service to a well-equipped fitness center – everything, that is, except a spa.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t get a hot stone massage or an herbal facial without leaving the premises. Read more
Don’t tip the Yotel robot
We’ll never know the identity of the enterprising employee who cleared his throat, stared down a guest and was remunerated for carrying a bag. But by the 1820s tipping the porter, like signing the register, was a ritual at hotels in New York and other big American cities.
Blame it on the buildings. Carrying bags wasn’t a problem for guests staying at small, squat colonial inns and taverns. But hotel architecture changed in the 1790s, with the advent of full-fledged hotels with complicated floor plans, writes A.K. Sandoval-Strausz in Hotel, An American History, a fascinating look at the evolution of the hotel. Read more
And a most unwelcome guest she is.
Flooding concerns in low-lying areas of Manhattan prompted several hotels at the island’s southern tip to close this weekend for city-mandated evacuation, including the Ritz Carlton New York Battery Park, the Andaz Wall Street, the New York Marriott Downtown and the tiny Wall Street Inn. And just like that, more than 1,000 hotel rooms dropped off the city’s radar. Read more
What are the top treatment requests at spas? Forget reflexology and mud wraps. Swedish massages and basic facials, the spa world’s plain vanilla, rule. But that hasn’t stopped spas from dreaming up fresh ways to promote relaxation, wellness and repeat visits.
Five new treatments, three at spas easily reached from New York and none of them cheap, caught my eye during the International Spa Association’s annual visit to New York.
Semi-automatic? It’s a vending machine, not a weapon, and you can see this big, oddly futuristic contraption in the lobby at the Hudson here in New York as well as at the Mondrian South Beach and the Sanderson in London. Read more