Hotels. Stardom gets crowded
FOXTROTS
Fox – sly. Trots – left-leaning (Trotsky) plus its more insalubrious meaning. Foxtrots – leading the industry in a dance.
2007 January 08
Hotels. Stardom gets crowded
Once, there was just Starwood Hotels, created by Barry Sternlicht (starlight…get it?). Now there is also Starwood Capital, created by the same Bright Barry.
No problem when one company concentrated on operating hotels, and the other concentrated on real estate, generally for hotels. But when Capital started to move into, effectively, hotel management, then the division starts to look complicated. Like Hilton and Hilton all over again.
Now both Hotels and Capital are launching new hotel brandnames, will this further confuse the customer – or does it no longer matter?
At Hotels, the new brands are Element, for extended-stay business, and Aloft, a mid-priced, reduced-service version of W Hotels. And Capital, even though it still has not made much of an impact with its Crillon top-level brand, has now launched the ‘1’ hotel brand, which it describers as “luxury, eco-friendly” hotels.
Nevertheless, I rather like the 1 idea – apart from the name, course, which is a bit silly. But if you work for Barry, you don’t challenge his brilliant ideas. Barry tells me, and all others who visit Capital’s website, that all-1s (see how silly?) will be based on “environmentally-sustainable internal and external design, and will follow green construction and operating principles together with a commitment to consumption of natural resources”.
If he follows this through, then he really may begin to change for the whole hotel business, not just for 1s.
The first four 1s – all in the
US – will be new-builds. However, he says the first international 1 will be in
Paris, a renovation of an existing hotel. Because so few existing structures are built to be environmentally friendly, will this follow those initial green claims? We withhold further comment.
He wants to have 15 1s signed or under construction within two years.
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