Hotel Blogs - When Hotel Marketing gets Social

Can Hotels rooms afford to be boring?

I have been very surprised to see how a well-designed product can disrupt the conventions of a boring product such as headphones.

Electronics usually become redundant and out of touch within months because of new features that brands try to sell us all the time (TV, HiFi, Phones...). When it comes to headphones, it is more difficult as it only serves up to 3 functionalities: listening privately your music, cancelling noise around you and being fashioned. This last aspect was totally ignored for decades and now we can see two leading brands that were not in the market a few years ago: Beats by Dr. Dre and SkullCandy.

These two brands took a dull product and made it ‘In” and interesting by disrupting what we knew. Red became fashionable.

UK has the largest hotel development pipeline in Europe

  According to Lodging Econometrics, Europe's Construction Pipeline is at 790 projects / 125,296 rooms at the end of Q1 this year.

The United Kingdom has the largest country Pipeline in Europe, with 26% of its total projects. At 208 projects / 27,607 rooms, the UK Pipeline has grown 1% by projects, but decreased 5% by rooms year-over-year (YoY). All other European countries combined have seen a 9% increase in projects and 3% increase by rooms YoY.

London Boutique hotels development in full power #bohosummit

Tim Smith from HVS shared an interesting map of Central London transactions in the Boutique hotel sector at the 1st edition of the Boutique Hotel Summit held in London earlier this week.

 

8 properties are in development (in brackets the estimated opening time):

A new hotel development in London caught on fire

Yesterday while we were talking Boutique Hotels, a new hotel development on the landmark of Marconi House (formerly headquarters of the BBC) caught fire on the roof of the building. More than 70 firefighters were trying to fight the major blaze in Central London. Neighbors were advised to close windows and some theatres cancelled their show for the evening.

Sol Melia is developing a 5* hotel which is due to be completed next year before the Olympics come to town in the summer 2012.

The Boutique Hotel concept: How did we get there? #bohosummit 2011

HotelBlogs was attending yesterday the 1st edition of the Boutique Hotel Summit held at the St Ermin's Hotel in London. Overall it was a successful event for a first edition and more than 100 people attended the event through the day. Congratulations to Piers Brown, his team, the speakers and the sponsors to make this event to happen.

The first panel was giving an introduction to what exactly is a Boutique hotel. How do you differentiate a Boutique hotel from a Lifestyle hotel.  Many definitions were given and we couldn’t really grasp one unique answer to this question.

Aman Resorts will open its 28th property in Turkey

The Singapore based luxury hotel group Amanresorts is opening its 28th property in  a quiet valley on Turkey's Bodrum Peninsula overlooking the Aegean Sea, in August 2011. 

 

The resort called Amanrurya (named for the Sanskrit word for peace, "aman," and the Turkish word for dream) will offer 36 cottages, each with private pools. 

 

Louvre Hotels to spend €300M on Campanile brand

Louvre Hotels (part of Starwood Capital), the 2^nd largest hotel group in France has announced yesterday that they will invest around €300M into their budget brand Campanile.

Marie-Pierre Mottin, VP Marketing and Business Development for Louvre Hotels explains that the Campanile brand became "a little tired” over the years. Campanile was born in 1976 and today represents a little less than 400 hotels in 9 countries.

IHG expends its fleet of hotels in EMEA

The giant hotel group Intercontinental Hotel Group has increased their number of hotels by 54 which translates in less than 8,000 rooms across EMEA regions.

According to Kirk Kinsell, president for Europe, Middle East and Africa, IHG has one of the biggest hotel development of new hotels. He says:  "Signing a further 54 properties is testament to the strength of our brands and reflects our commitment to growth in Europe. These new additions mean IHG continues to hold the hospitality industry's largest development pipeline with 1,236 hotels worldwide."

Marriott and its new lifestyle hotel brand get sued

Back in 2007, Marriott announced that they were entering into a partnership with the hotel innovator Ian Schrager to develop a new innovative lifestyle hotel brand. The press release was talking about a development of 100 hotels within a decade (until 2017).

4 years later, this brand is alive and they even have 2 hotels open. It's called Edition Hotels.

A luxury shop in Paris converted to a luxury hotel

La Samaritaine used to be a famous place to shop in Paris whether you were a local Parisian or a tourist. This huge building was closed down in 2005 because the place was getting too old and needed some serious renovation in order to make it safe for the shoppers.

The building owner LVMH (owner of Louis Vuitton and more) has received permission from the city offocials to tranfform the property into a luxury hotel including the Cheval Blanc hotel, a Louis Vuitton retail boutique, daycare center and 95 units of affordable housing. This massive projet expects to start next year for a least 3 years of renovation and construction. This means this will be the 2nd hotel projet for the luxury gaint. The first Cheval Blanc hotel is in the French ski resort Courchevel.

This is how the La Samaritaine site looks right now.