Happy Hotelier’s High Five (5):

1. Honeymoon Funded By Trash by Current| Bèta, a sort of video startup with Video News (a bit like Alltop) about how newly weds scored their neighborhood for trash that they exchanged for Air miles to finance their honeymoon.
2. Top 10 Most Dangerous Waves in the World by Rhys Stacker of Matador Trips. I’m not a surfer myself, but the photos are fantastic!
3. The Mistress of Taliesin a wonderful story in Last Exit Magazine about a guided tour to the home built by Frank Lloyd Wright for his mistress who as a ghost still haunts you.
4. SpeakerSue Says:Time management, Productivity and Email: This you HAVE to read!. Hilarious, self explanatory and for me as lateral thinker a reassurance.
5. Globorati | Top 10 Ultra Boutique Hotels

Read more about Happy Hotelier’s High Five.

Happy Hotelier's High Five (5): Green Honeymoon, Killer Waves, Frank Loyd Wright tour, Time Management and Ultra Boutique Hotels is a post from: Happy Hotelier. Would you like to subscribe to my newsfeed, or my weekly newsletter?

Recently my friend and fellow travel blogger Guillaume Thevenot of Hotel Blogs ranted in Hotel Blog Rants about PR about all the stupid press releases you get in your mailbox as a Travel Blogger. I get my fair part of nonsense as well.

However, Sue Heady, Director of Communications of the new Pantin Hotels Group did it the right way: She alerted me with a simple press release about the opening of The Ellington in Leeds and the fact they have attracted one of the youngest chefs to operate their restaurant.

From the website Pantin Hotels and from some artist renderings she very promptly sent me on request, I got interested to post about this new hotel on the block. Not in the last place, because this is a hotel in the very backyard of another good cyber friend and fellow Travel Blogger, Darren Cronian of the Travel Rants Blog. Hint for Sue: Invite Darren for the opening party and maybe you’ll get some coverage in a first class Travel Blog at reasonable low cost!

Some key persons of the Pantin team come from the Rocco Forte collection.
The Pantin group’s first hotel will be The Ellington in Leeds.
The Ellington has 35 air conditioned rooms, including three Junior Suites, a one bedroom suite and a two bedroom suite.

Pantin’s second project is The Crispin

Crispin House, a distinctive Grade II listed building, is to become a significant new luxury hotel and spa. The property, set to open in 2010, comprises of 84 bedrooms of which 26 are suites and 22 dedicated rooms for spa guests. Bedrooms will be amongst the largest in the industry averaging over 50 square metres.

Leeds: The Ellington Scheduled to Open in September, 2008 is a post from: Happy Hotelier. Would you like to subscribe to my newsfeed, or my weekly newsletter?

The CitizenM Room has various neat design features:

Its 2 m long and 2 m wide Bed under the window with, on the west side of the hotel, nice views on one of the landing strips of Schiphol Airport:

Under the bed, like in yachts, there is a huge trunk size drawer where you can stash your luggage away. Next to the entrance there are 5 coat and dress hangers over a small locker that can hold a small laptop without loading facility for its batteries.

How do they manage to care for those beds? Very simple: They developed a system whereby the whole mattress can be pulled up to the front of the bed vertically. The used sheets fall of and the clean sheets can be hung up on the two upper corners in stead of crawling around the bed which would be impossible. They applied for a patent for the system.

The view gets nicer when the sun sets:

The shower and the Throne have each their own cylindric glass separation. The throne’s glass is etched. Between the shower and the bed there is a room wide curtain to separate the bath”room” part from the Sleeping part of the room. In the Throne’s cylinder an extra air suction facility prevents odors.

Here you see the two cylinders closed. Left is The Hotel Throne. Even I with my considerable belly can easily pass between the two cylinders. In the middle you see the sink. Under the sink is a small cupboard that holds the waste basket. No tiles behind the sink. The floor of the room is quite slippery when wet.

In this photo of Citizen M taken from the bed, you can see the mood lighting and, on the left,the separation curtain (they took care of the Yotel guest reviews that were complaining about the visibility of the Yotel Throne) and the rain shower. There are two tables in front of the bed and there is one chair available: The Vitra re issued C1 chair designed by Verner Panton.

Between the sink and the throne there is a turnable frame with on the one side a man high mirror and on the other side some small shelfs to store stuff and a shaving mirror and some international shaving wall sockets.

This photo I took in the big mirror.

This photo I took in the shaving mirror.

Detail of the sink with huge soap block

Two types of shampoo and a water bottle which is the only drink available in the room. Other drinks you have to fetch in the lobby cum canteen M…however I noticed they closed the lot during the night at around 2 AM while Rattan claimed during his introduction that it would be open all night!

I don’t know what to think of this feature: The Citizen M Doll. If you think it is a gift you are wrong: They charge a hefty Euro 20 for it!

Conclusions

Room rates vary according to demand and start with Euro 69 per night up to Euro 139 per night.

The bed sleeps fine.

All in all I am really impressed by the care for detail in this concept. Especially the lack of outside noise is amazing with all the planes flying around at Schiphol Airport.

Good value for money if you are looking for a bed to crash in.

CitizenM Hotel Amsterdam Airport Schiphol Opening (2): The Room is a post from: Happy Hotelier. Would you like to subscribe to my newsfeed, or my weekly newsletter?

He looks a bit tired, but here is Rattan Chadha, the founder of CitizenM and former owner of the Mexx fashion company who opened the press conference.

Some quotes as a starter:

• They started 4 years ago.
• Rattan traveled more in his prior life than many in the audience of the well attended press conference will ever do in their and their children’s lifetime.
• It is very important that the whole operation is set up by a team.
• One of the first team members is his cricket mate for over 20 years, Jan Wulf van Alkemade, who makes his living in hotel amenities.
• A good hotel room is about a good bed, a good shower and a good TV.
• TV films and Wifi are free.
• Savvy travelers want short check in and short check out times. Rattan claims being a tech nitwit and managed a check in time of 40 seconds. My own not so nitwit experience is rather 5 minutes, but even that is fine.
• In 2020 market expectations are 1,5 billion people traveling abroad, India alone 50 mio (India in 2002 had only 5 mio people traveling from India abroad)
• If I have worked hard and late, I want to be able to get sushi at 3.00 AM rather than frozen spaghetti warmed up by the night manager or some soggy hamburger. On the other hand we don’t want the staff around until somebody orders food at 3.00 Am. Therefore we have developed our own food concept.
• If you arrive at a hotel, you want to be welcomed by a real person. Therefor Citizen M has ambassadors who are not trained in the hospitality industry.

Michael Eman, the F and B manager who developed the F and B concept from the beginning adds: “We have two very important moments here: The coffee moment and the cocktail moment: All our ambassadors are first class barristas and cocktail makers”

Update
As usual I have been wrestling with both my old heavy laptop and the Wifi system in the Citizen M hotel room. The Blue Tooth connection of the

Citizen M Remote “do it all” Control, developed by Philips,

interfered with the remote control’s other functions and was not stable at all. After wrestling for an hour and a half I gave it up.

Rattan Chadha may not like this photo, but I caught him with one of the Citizen M signs above the cold section of the self service food and beverage wall: “Citizen M Says: I’m Cold”. Well I felt left a bit in the cold with the non functioning of the remote control/Wifi combination. BTW here at home I rechecked and the old and heavy laptop does function perfectly with my own Wifi.
As a final observation I wonder why they didn’t let it read “Citizen M Says: I’m Cool“

Amsterdam Citizen M Opening (1) is a post from: Happy Hotelier. Would you like to subscribe to my newsfeed, or my weekly newsletter?

Olga and her Brother Rocco Forte

This post, mainly about Olga, has been on the backburner for quite some time, as I had misplaced an interview with Olga Polizzi on my computer, but recently found back.

The interview is by Locum’s managing director James Alexander and Locum’s non-executive director Tony Hodges for Locum Destination Review, a publication of Locum Consulting. It appears the interview can stil be easily found at Locum’s website under the title Olga Polizzi, an eye for individuality.

I’ll start with Olga

Olga Polizzi is a hotel investor, a hotel designer and a hotel proprietor: A real Hotelier.

She is the daughter of famous hotelier Lord Forte. She was married to Count Alessandro Polizzi, an Italian marquess who died in a racing-car accident in 1980, leaving her to bring up her two daughters – then six and four -on her own. For 16 years she was responsible for building and design within his eponymous chain that I remember as Trusthouse Forte long before Granada raided it. More recently, Olga has been a co-investor and again responsible for design in the mini-chain being driven by her brother, Sir Rocco Forte. Finally, she is a hotel proprietor of Hotel Tresanton in St Mawes, Cornwall.

The William part

of this post is William Shawcross, according to his Profile born 28 May 1946 in Sussex, raised at Eton and Oxford. Son of Baron Shawcross. Married to Olga Polizzi, his third wife and her second husband. According to his own website William Shawcross

is an internationally renowned writer and broadcaster. As well as being the author of several highly acclaimed books on subjects as wide-ranging as the Shah of Iran and Rupert Murdoch, he appears regularly on television and radio. His articles have appeared in leading newspapers and journals throughout the world.

His profile, basically by Ed Vulliamy and published Sunday July 13, 2003 in The Observer notes:

William the conqueror (which heading inspired me to the title of this post)

As a radical young writer, he took on the US establishment over Vietnam. Now he counts American hawks as friends and has been appointed biographer to the Queen Mother. What will he do with the House of Windsor’s secrets?……

Marriage to Olga Polizzi, Shawcross’s partner in the ownership and management of the Hotel Tresanton, gave Shawcross the surroundings he needed to both ‘gaze at the sea’ and pen his treatment for last year’s BBC series Queen and Country. It was three years in the making and denounced as ’sycophantic and fawning’ to the Crown, but it became the collateral for his forthcoming book.

The marriage put the couple at the epicentre of Establishment entertaining: Prince Charles and Shawcross’s old friend Camilla Parker Bowles (her father was a friend of Sir Hartley) are regular guests.

And it enabled the author of Sideshow to attain what he says, as a supposed joke, is his aim in life: to be ‘a Basil Fawlty to my wife – one who writes a bit’.

From the Locum interview

I noted some interesting thoughts of Olga:

She likes:

• Individuality,
  

  because the hotelier wants to distinguish the hotel from the one next door and make it more popular. And then the guest comes in and sees something different and likes it.

• Service:
  

  Service is 70 per cent of it, really. Service is incredibly important, how you are greeted, hot water, is it friendly?, telephone calls ….’ Despite the new sophistication of the seasoned traveller, ‘we are still the same humans we always were … mainly we want comfort, good food, good service … you’re just playing around with the elements a bit.’

• Comfy Design:
  

  ‘I like going somewhere really brilliant and new … I’ll notice the door handles … but most people, you ask them what colour the room was and they won’t remember … it’s just a feeling, it’s everything in its right place, everything really comfortable.

• Sound Economics:
  

  ‘We are quite careful and budget-conscious. I can’t bear it when I see something like Sandy Lane where they’ve spent £80 million on it. We’re in there to make money and cannot spend that sort of money.’

• Her first own hotel: The Tresanto
  

  ‘When I first opened it, the accountant down there said ‘You can’t make money on a hotel in Cornwall’, but I said ‘I haven’t put all this effort and money in not to make money, we’re going to make money’. Actually, we are doing incredibly well. This is my fourth year …. I broke even from the first year …

She dislikes:

• “The Designer Hotel”
  

  ‘The Designer hotel’ – ‘a designer hotel doesn’t look at comfort … it’s so often done
  too cheaply, everything breaks, you take a shower and the water pours out into the room, all the little things that drive you completely mad … design is not for its own sake.’

• Establishing her own brand. Not so much in her own words but in the interviewers’ finale:
  

  She admits that she is in demand. ‘Practically every day I get someone writing to me. What
  colour paint is this in the room? Where did you get this bedspread or this material? Where do you get your handles, your basins, your baths? It’s extraordinary … someone came the other day and they’ve called their house Tresanton,’ she trills. Yet down in the family’s gift and fashion boutique in St Mawes – ONDA – for all the well-cut clothes and Tresanton iconography on towels and lavender sachets, and the £50 umbrella and £5 soap, there is no sense that Olga Polizzi is taking her potential brand strengths seriously enough. She should. She is a talented individual with a rare eye and a fine business brain. And she has something that ordinary mortals understandably envy. In all innocence, she defines this something simply and memorably when discussing good
  food and good design. ‘It’s true of both, design and food. There is a connection. It’s good taste at the end of the day.’ Precisely so, Mrs Polizzi. Now why not share your taste with a
  wider audience? Heroes make good brand stories, but so do heroines.

A Telegraph article In Pollizi Custody describes her next project: The acquisition of the Grade I-listed Endsleigh House on Dartmoor and refurbishment into a five star hotel.

In another Telegraph interview aptly titled Perfection is her Forte

• “I’m completely obsessive-compulsive. I can never talk to anybody if a crooked painting catches my eye. And I tell myself, ‘Olga, do shut up,’ but I can’t help it. When I used to go to other hotels with my daughters [Alexandra, 33, and Charlotte, 31], I would be straightening all the furniture and they would say, ‘Ma, this isn’t your hotel.’ “

Wow! What a designer!

Update:

I found the photo at another worthwhile interview with her last year over at the Artisans of Leisure Travel Blog

Last edited by Happy Hotelier on March 3, 2010 at 2:54 pm

Hoteliers William and Olga is a post from: Happy Hotelier. Would you like to subscribe to my newsfeed, or my weekly newsletter?