June 29, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (3)

I am convinced that strange things are happening out there. I don’t know if they’re related to global warming or the odd summer that is going on everywhere in the United States, but..., well, strange. It is not one thing that prompts me to write this, but several.

A friend read one of my “One Man’s Opinion” pieces posted on my Web site in early April and asked last week if I had any reason to “retract anything I wrote” then. My response was “no,” due in large part to all the strange things I’m observing.

Here are some of those things:

Legal finger-pointing by owners against managers
Broadreach Capital has attempted to terminate Four Seasons at the Aviara Resort in Ca...Read More

June 22, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (4)

I don’t have a particularly good, unified idea for this blog, so I decided to address some random thoughts bouncing around the empty space in my cranium. This one pertains to "Things I’d Prefer Not to Hear Anymore."

The AIG Effect: I’m tired of hearing about this. The AIG team may have gone overboard, but, truth is, every one of our high-end group hotels (and some in the “first-class” range) would have encouraged (and still would encourage) exactly what AIG did with its senior management – a meeting at a property that included meals, coffee breaks, nice rooms, spa and golf. For hoteliers in group or meetings-oriented properties to continue to bemoan this – and the President’s misguided public criticism (and it was, indeed, misguided) – is beginning to sound like self-pity....Read More

June 15, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (2)

Following the NYU hotel investment conference, I have been thinking about ways of finding financing in this marketplace. Just before the conference, coincidentally, I reconnected with an old friend, Rick Rosenberg. Bear with me as I relate these two facts to each other.

For many years, we have seen larger cities build and own, directly or through subsidiary governmental agencies (we used to call these “quasi-governmental agencies,” but no one knows what “quasi” really means), convention centers and convention center hotels. Chicago, Denver, San Antonio and Dallas are recent examples of cities that have done the latter (and the former, too) and I understand that Salt Lake City has a convention center hotel in the works, as well. These cities have been able to build these hotels by using either municipal bonds or indu...Read More

June 9, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (2)

I promised Jeff Weinstein, editor in chief of HOTELS (and my blog editor), that I would likely get one or two blogs out of the recently concluded NYU investment conference. Well, Jeff, I am not going to be able to do it. 

Why? Jeff already said in one sentence what my blogs would have said (he posted this on Wednesday, June 3): "But the overriding sentiment I heard from hoteliers who were not on stage in front of 1,000 people is that visibility of a recovery remains clouded, at best."

I talked to my colleagues, friends and acquaintances from Sunday night’s cocktail party through Tuesday afternoon. I attended the two CEO sessions and, of course, IREFAC. I sat at a very nice dinner hosted by Perkins Coie with several colleagues from up-and...Read More

June 3, 2009 | Link This | Email this | Comments (1)

Have you ever seen one of those signs in a public washroom in a restaurant that says “Employees Must Wash Hands before Returning to Work”? This is one of those signs that strike me as unnecessary. Do the signs remind the employees to wash their hands? Are they there to tell the patrons that the restaurant wants its employees to do so? How is this requirement enforced? Is there a hand-wash check when the employee returns to his or her station?

This thought arises after I spent a recent day in New York participating in a panel for lawyers on hotels, designed to enable me to obtain CLE credits to keep my law license (I might consider in a future blog why I’m doing this anyway) and to market my services to those coming to obtain their CLE credits.

One of the matters discussed was the hotel brands’ concerns with devel...Read More