External Articles

London hotel free WiFi touchdown is launched! | londonhotelsinsight.com

This blog has been campaigning intensely for free WiFi at hotels for quite a while. We’ve been supported by a network of leading travel bloggers and tweeters across the world including the likes of Velvet Escape, Top Travel Content Europe, Elliott.org, Travel Rants and many others. The hostility to hotel WiFi charges across the blogosphere is almost universal and yet many hoteliers choose to ignore it, while hypocritically pretending they’re “in” on Twitter and Facebook. They’re acting like embarassing dads – inappropriately dressed and showing off dated moves in a club they don’t belong in. Because charging guests extra for WiFi at expensive hotels goes against the whole grain of how people live today.

Sir Rocco Forte: 'I still haven't got to Paris...and I want to try New York' | independent.co.uk

He lost one empire to Granada, but now hotel magnate Rocco is well on the way to building another. Brown's Hotel in Mayfair, where Rudyard Kipling wrote The Jungle Book, to see the current owner Sir Rocco Forte. The sleek interior is a very different setting to the last time I interviewed him, in January 1995 on the occasion of his 50th birthday. He had just been knighted and had not long taken full control of the family business.

Newly sold Mint Hotels to be branded as Hilton Worldwide properties | caterersearch.com

Mint Hotels is to be rebranded as one of the Hilton Worldwide brands following the acquisition of the company by the private equity Blackstone Group for a reported £600m. It is believed that the DoubleTree by Hilton and the Hilton Garden Inn brands are the most likely names to be attached to the eight Mint hotels - seven in the UK and one in Amsterdam. The Blackstone Group is the owner of Hilton Worldwide.

London 2012: A hotel first | reuters.com

How gingerly should travel managers and business travellers approach London’s hotels during next summer’s Olympic Games? The UK capital at the end of July and the beginning of August 2012 is going to be a busier place than normal in a city where hotel occupancy rates of 90 percent are common in summer. No matter how many locals flee the capital for calmer climes (Oxford Economics forecasts that the UK will lose £91 million from Londoners heading overseas due to overcrowding fears), hundreds of thousands of Olympics ticket-holders and ticketless hangers-on are expected in town. They’ll all need somewhere to stay.

UK: Tax hotels not flights, suggests Ryanair boss | telegraph.co.uk

Michael O'Leary said a £1 per night tax on rooms could recoup a significant proportion of what is now raised by APD, while cutting costs for British holidaymakers and encouraging more foreign travellers to visit Britain.

How London hotel guests define luxury | londonhotelsinsight.com

The word “luxury” is bandied about so freely these days that it has lost much of its value. Nowhere is this more true than with hotels. Tired of the hype? This post takes a guest-centric view on luxury using TripAdvisor. In a previous article we criticised the use of misleading star ratings. Today we take aim at the term “luxury”, especially as applied to “boutique hotels” (a problematic term in itself). And particularly hotels that go for the double whammy by calling themselves “luxury boutique hotels”.

Hotel revenue per booking jumps nearly 400% for Royal Wedding weekend | caterersearch.com

London hotel revenue per booking is to increase by nearly 400% for the Royal Wedding weekend, according to technology provider Pegasus Solutions.

In a special edition of The Pegasus View produced on the eve of the nuptials, the average revenue per booking is shown to rise by as much as 383.7% on 30 April compared with the same day in 2010, 215.1% on the preceding weekend and 210.9% for the post-wedding weekend.

UK: Top hotel brands face price-fixing probe after 'setting minimum prices' | dailymail.co.uk

Three major hotel groups are being investigated by the Office of Fair Trading over claims they fixed prices. The Radisson, Thistle and Starwood chains – which run hotels all over the world – are accused of secretly setting room rates with online travel agents and ordering them not to offer discounts. It means holidaymakers may have had to pay hundreds of pounds more than they should have.

London 2012 Olympics: hotels revolt over 2012 resale prices | telegraph.co.uk

Some of London's most prestigious hotel brands are taking legal advice over their contracts to supply rooms at preferential rates to London Olympics organisers after learning that their rooms are being resold by agents at what they consider "grossly inflated prices". The hotel groups – including Intercontinental, Hilton, Thistle, Guoman and Starwood – are said to be furious that rooms are being sold to the public as part of ticket-and-accommodation packages by Thomas Cook, the "official provider of short breaks" for London 2012.

Sands eyeing $20 billion 'Euro-Vegas' in Spain | bloomberg.com

Las Vegas Sands Corp. wants to build "Euro-Vegas" in Spain, its CEO Sheldon Adelson said Thursday, touting a euros 15 billion ($20.3 billion) plan for a massive strip-style casino resort in Madrid or Barcelona. Sands is in talks with officials from both cities about the project, which could have 20,000 hotel rooms, millions of square feet of retail and convention space and create 180,000 jobs, Adelson told reporters in Singapore. "I want to do a mini-Las Vegas in Europe," Adelson said. "I hope we can use the name Europe Vegas or Euro-Vegas."

BAHA Conference: The future of hotels, through the eyes of top CEOs | bighospitality.co.uk

CEOs and top executives at Malmaison & Hotel du Vin, CitizenM Hotels, Best Western Hotels and InterContinental Hotels Group share their views on what’s in store for the industry, and where hoteliers should be focusing. Below are some of the highlights from a CEO panel discussion on the future of the industry, held yesterday at the British Association of Hospitality Accountants (BAHA) annual conference.

Rise, fall and return of London’s railway hotels | londonhotelsinsight.com

London’s railway hotels were one of the wonders of the High Victorian age. The best known was the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras, a Gothic wonder more like a baronial castle than a hotel building; but each of the London termini once had its own hotel, from the GWR at Paddington to the Great Eastern at Liverpool Street. What on earth has happened to them?

How Hotel 41 got to no.1 on TripAdvisor | londonhotelsinsight.com

I recently visited Hotel 41 where I met the General Manager of this luxury boutique hotel in Victoria – Malcolm Hendry – as well as the MD of Red Carnation Hotels (and Hotelier of the Year 2009) Jonathan Raggett. I wanted to learn how Hotel 41 had achieved the position of being rated the best London hotel by TripAdvisor reviewers over recent months.

Best London hotel blogs dissected | londonhotelsinsight.com

As someone who blogs obsessively about London hotels, I’m sometimes asked by hoteliers if starting a blog makes business sense for them too. My answer is “yes, but only if you are fully committed”. The web is littered with abandoned blogs and the world certainly doesn’t need more of them. What then defines a good hotel blog?

U.K. Opens Probe of Online Hotel Bookers | wsj.com

The U.K. Office of Fair Trading said Thursday that it has opened a formal investigation into possible breaches of competition law in the hotel online booking sector. "The investigation is at a very early stage and the OFT will not be in a position to conclude whether it considers the law has been infringed until it has completed its investigation and assessed the available evidence," the agency said in an emailed statement.

The Crafty Traveller: No-frills hotels - budget brilliance or more than you bargained for? | dailymail.co.uk

Heard about the hotel that charges extra if you want your room cleaned? It sounds like a (bad) joke, doesn't it? But such a hotel actually exists, and it's in London. Last week, Tune Hotels, an Asian chain of budget hotels with properties in Malaysia and Indonesia, opened its first UK hotel, near Waterloo station. The company has plans to open 15 more hotels in the capital over the next seven years.

Breakfast With Michel Rey, GM at the The Baur au Lac, Zurich, Switzerland | famoushotels.org

Michel Rey, legendary general manager of the Baur au Lac in Zurich, Switzerland, had time for breakfast. Read for yourself why he wants to "read 587 books, play reasonably well the 2nd piano concert of Rachmaninow, find the mummy of Nofretete and win - finally - the British Open". A travel report takes you back to the roots of grand Swiss Hospitality. A journey through time, ending in 1927.