Home Tags Posts tagged with "luxury hotel"
luxury hotel
China’s Anbang has agreed to buy Strategic Hotels & Resorts from private equity giant Blackstone for $6.5 billion.
Strategic Hotels and Resorts owns 18 luxury hotels, 17 of which are located in the United States and one of which is in Germany.
Blackstone is selling Strategic Hotels & Resorts, which owns 16 properties, just three months after buying the company themselves.
The luxury hotels chain includes the Four Seasons resorts in Arizona and Wyoming.
The deal marks the biggest US property purchase by a mainland Chinese buyer.
Chinese companies have been buying overseas assets despite the slowing economy.
Mainland investors have been snapping up prime US properties and other overseas assets to diversify their holdings amid concerns about weakness in China’s economy.
Anbang bought New York’s famous Waldorf-Astoria from Blackstone for a record $1.95 billion in 2015.
The Beijing-based company also owns office buildings in New York and Canada and a South Korean insurance company.
It tried to buy Portuguese bank Novo Banco in 2015, but that fell through because of political objections over the sale of a systemically important European lender.
In 2015, Chinese outbound acquisitions hit a record $108 billion, according to data provider Dealogic.
However, that amount is on track to be overtaken, given that more than $84 billion in deals have already been made so far this year, including the $43 billion purchase of Swiss agri-firm Syngenta by ChemChina.
Justin Bieber continues to prove that the European leg of his world tour, Believe, hasn’t got off to the best of starts.
And on Monday things seemed to take a turn for the worse after Justin Bieber was reportedly kicked out of the most prestigious hotel in Paris because of bad behavior.
Justin Bieber, 19, checked into the fabled Hotel Le Meurice on Sunday but just a day later his “attitude” and “blatant encouragement of fans waiting outside led to him being evicted”.
However, Justin Bieber’s spokesperson has rubbished the reports as “nonsense” and said it was in fact the star’s decision to leave the hotel for “safety reasons”.
“He chose to switch hotels because once he had engaged with some of the fans in front of the hotel, an overwhelming crowd congregated outside.
“The original hotel did not have a separate exit, which created a potential safety issue for everyone.”
A spokesman for the Meurice, also denied he had been kicked out as while they confirmed that the star had left suddenly, they insisted that the hotel’s management had not asked him to go.
“Justin Bieber had indeed left the establishment to go elsewhere, but we do not know
where,” he said.
“But this is a decision made by him or his team. We do not turn people away.”
Justin Bieber was reportedly kicked out of the most prestigious hotel in Paris because of bad behavior
Justin Bieber had originally booked seven suites on two floors for him and his vast entourage, at a cost of well into six figures at the historic institution in the Paris which is used by royalty and film stars.But within a few hours hundreds of young fans had begun massing outside and even inside the lobby.
Jean-Marc Morandini, a TV and radio showbiz presenter in Paris, said on his blog on Monday: “Justin Bieber has just been kicked out of the Meurice Hotel in Paris.
“It was a decision taken by the management of the luxury hotel because of his attitude in the establishment, and because of the nuisance caused by the presence of his fans around the buildings.”
Insiders at the hotel, a favorite of numerous big names including Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, as well as members of the British Royal Family, said that the noise had become “intolerable”.
“There were kids everywhere screaming and shouting, and the other guests just didn’t like it,” said the source.
“Justin was clearly encouraging his fans – that’s something he has to do.”
Justin Bieber, who is due to perform at the Palais Omnisports in Paris-Bercy on Tuesday night, was later seen checking into the equally luxurious Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Paris.
Clearly not too concerned about the turn of events, Justin Bieber tweeted: “Loving Paris.”
Justin Bieber was forced to apologize to fans in London earlier this month after arriving 2 hours late on stage.
Het Arresthuis was one of the Netherlands’ most feared prisons for almost 150 years, but following its closure and something of a makeover, it has been transformed into a luxury hotel.
The 105 prisoner’s quarters have been converted into 40 spacious rooms, including 24 standard rooms, 12 deluxe rooms, and four suites, all of which feature modern furnishings and chic interior design.
All of the rooms are equipped with air conditioning, a flat screen TV, free WiFi, and even a personal coffee and tea machine.
The hotel also features a sauna, fitness centre, central patio with olive trees, and an organic herb garden.
Het Arresthuis opened its doors in 1862 and quickly established a reputation as an intimidating jail.
Despite the prison featuring lots of bars, this place has both kinds – the ones you can’t get past and the ones where you can get a drink.
After being abandoned for a number of years, Het Arresthuis reopened in 2002. But in mid 2007 it closed permanently after which construction of the hotel began.
Het Arresthuis was also called “bolletjesbajes” which translates as stuffer’s prison.
Het Arresthuis was one of the Netherlands’ most feared prisons for almost 150 years, but following its closure and something of a makeover, it has been transformed into a luxury hotel
Het Arresthuis in Roermond is not the only former prison which has been transformed into a hotel.
After closing in 1996, Oxford Prison in UK was transformed into a Malmaison hotel.
Another prison which is now a hotel is the Jailhotel Lowengraben in Lucerne, Switzerland.
Built in 1862, it was used as a prison until 1998, before being converted into a hotel.
[youtube v5rhoR2ZnIQ]
[youtube E43vjIIqESI]
Former hotel staffer Jacob Tomsky has detailed the sketchy, raunchy, and sometimes scandalous things that hotel workers do when guests’ heads are turned in his new book, Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustlers and So-Called Hospitality.
After 11 years in the industry, including a couple years at a high-end hotel in New Orleans and several years at a luxury hotel in Manhattan, Jacob Tomsky says he’s come to know the dark underbelly of the hospitality industry.
Jacob Tomsky writes that long hours and rude guests lead staffers to seek an outlet for their frustration through mischief – which sometimes involves plotting revenge against the wealthy jerks they are forced to accommodate.
“A lot of people are watching <<Downton Abbey>> now, and they think, <<Oh, I’ve got servants, too!>>” Jacob Tomsky told the New York Post.
“Especially the affluent. They treat people as they never would otherwise. Meanwhile, hardworking people – who might be getting screwed – won’t say anything. It’s the people who have way more money who want everything now, and they want it for free.”
Daily shortcomings in cleanliness are commonplace, Jacob Tomsky says.
The dirty secrets that luxury hotels don’t want you to know revealed by Jacob Tomsky
Duvets are never cleaned. The covers sometimes are – but the duvets? Never.
Drinking glasses are not washed with soap and water, but shined up with furniture polish to make them sparkle like new.
For particularly difficult guests, a staffer might seek revenge on their toothbrush or even change their key card to lock them out of their room – something that gave the overworked employees a small sliver of pleasure when the exasperated guest approached the front desk for a new card.
Jacob Tomsky said he also came across staffers who stole from minibars and from valet-parked cars.
Often, the mischief that staffers engaged in was purely out of boredom, he said.
“I’ve worked a month straight without a day off,” he said, describing “the mind-numbing boredom of an overnight shift”.
Boredom led to rifling through guests’ stuff, reading intimate information about them and giggling over their collections of sex toys.
“I found a pretty foul letter left in a room,” he said.
“It was about someone’s wife being a whore. It was probably a joke, because there was a stamp on it of genitalia, addressed to a Mr. Cuckold, with details about her sexual activities.”
Jacob Tomsky’s book is a warning, as well as a wake-up call, to hotel guests. He offers some suggestions for dealing with hotel staffers in a way that won’t leave you with a soiled toothbrush and a deactivated key card. As expected, those suggestions typically involve a generous tip for the staffer.
He has since quit the hotel industry and immediately sought anger management therapy to recover from his decade in the business.
French fashion designer Thierry Gillier has apologized for saying that Chinese holidaymakers will not be welcome at a luxury hotel he plans to open in Paris.
Thierry Gillier, founder of label Zadig and Voltaire, told the magazine Women’s Wear Daily that his hotel “won’t be open to Chinese tourists”.
The statement caused outrage in China where his comments went viral on social networking sites.
Thierry Gillier has said his comments were taken out of context.
“My remarks were doubtless clumsy… I understand they might have hurt my friends from China, France or elsewhere, and I am deeply sorry for that,” he said in a statement on Thursday.
The statement added that Thierry Gillier wanted to underscore the exclusivity of the hotel and emphasize that it would not cater for the mass tourism market.
Thierry Gillier had urged the magazine to modify his quotation from “Chinese tourists” to “busloads of tourists”.
The Zadig hotel is due to open in 2014 on Paris’s chic Left Bank.
