Antalya Travel Guide
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Someone Forgot to Pay the Electricity Bill at the World's Luxest Luxury Hotel
We're gonna need more candles!
Here's another example of why those hotel star ratings and hotel awards sometimes don't mean all that much.
The Mardan Palace in Turkey, which is a seven-star hotel that beat out the Burj Al Arab and the Dorchester for the title of "leading luxury hotel" from the World Travel Awards, has had the power cut off because of unpaid bills.
The hotel is currently using generators to power up its 546 rooms and has only three weeks to pay off nearly $2.6 million in debts. However, the general manager has assured the press that the hotel will clear up the power snafu:
Aksam [newspaper] quoted the hotel's manager, Cumhur Ozen, as saying the issue stemmed from an end of year budgeting problem and promised to pay the debt.
"We are a large company. We invested 1.2 billion dollars. We won't be worn out by small debts," Ozen said. "We will pay the debt."
In the meantime, all the hotel employees have been asked to go on their annual leaves at this time. And we're guessing this hotel doesn't have any robots to take their place.
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The Hotel Missoni is Hungry for Turkey, Opening a Hotel in 2013
Edinburgh...Kuwait...Oman...Brazil. The list of current and under-construction Missoni Hotels is an exotic one, and today we can add another city to the list: Antalya, Turkey. 2013 will bring a Missoni Hotel to the Turkish Riviera, and although this one will follow the pattern of the other Missoni by having the interior personally designed by Rosita Missoni, its exterior will differ greatly. It's going to have a celebrity-designed golf course!
Hotel MIssoni Belek, Antalya is bringing in Swedish golf champ Annika Sörenstam to create the 18-hole course, which will be just one of the attraction in the development around the hotel; there'll also be a country club, shops, residential villas and an olive grove. That last bit sounds much closer to Missoni's Italian heritage than gray days in Edinburgh.
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A Music Festival in a Five Star Hotel On This Beach, What More Could You Want?
Is it festival time already? We’re thinking not, given the weather in Europe is leaving a lot to be desired this week. But that means it’s probably time to start fantasizing about music festivals. But not muddy, grubby, campy festivals; we're talking posh festivals that take place in a five star hotel. Is that cheating? Don’t care. We want to go to the Antalya SunSplash Festival in Turkey.
The festival itself is about fairly clubby music, with big name DJs like Norman Jay and Gilles Peterson (of Radio One fame). But what we’re really interested in is its location, Design Hotel Hillside SU – a sparkling white (in-room lighting is what makes the place trendy rather than boring) resort for Euro hipsters.
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Tagging Isn't Just Allowed, It's Encouraged at the Marmara Antalya
We can't be the only ones who have daydreamed about unleashing our inner rebel in the form of graffiti art. We've long admired the medium, but have stopped short of spray painting freeway overpasses or surreptitiously leaving our mark on train cars late at night.
However, thanks to the Marmara Antalya would-be Banksys are being given a safe space to turn graffiti dreams into reality. In its light-filled hotel lobby, tagging isn't just allowed; it's encouraged.
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Mardan Palace Is Wacky, Glitzy and Has A Vacustyler
Any hotel that uses Mariah Carey and Tom Jones for its opening entertainment is bound to offer a few surprises, and the Mardan Palace in Antalya, Turkey, does that and more – a whole lot more, if a recent Daily Mail review is anything to go on.
The review throws a bunch of crazy superlatives around right at the start, calling the Mardan Palace the brashest, wackiest and glitziest resort they know. And then the amazing facts begin: the bowls in the Italian restaurant cost $840 each, the cutlery bill for the hotel was $28 million (which seems a little hard to believe, but...) and the hotel's private beach includes $1.7 million worth of imported white sand, much of which will need replacing every year.
If money's no object, then you can have a heck of a lot of fun at the Mardan Palace. There are professional divers to help you explore the hotel's own reef, bathrooms with gold-plated sinks, a chocolate fountain at breakfast and a Vacustyler in the spa which is a kind of shrink-wrapping machine originally developed to help the circulation of astronauts.
Surprisingly, there are some relatively affordable room rates — we found a Premium room in October at €260 ($370) a night and even an Executive suite was only €480 ($680), although all the bookings from October 15 onward are blacked out — so get in quick for your glitz and brashness at this price.
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Mariah Carey Lends Her Diva-ness to Turkey's New Mardan Palace
When you're opening up a ridiculously expensive, lavish, opulent hotel — whether the place is in Dubai or Dallas — you want to bring out the biggest of the big guns when you're selecting your celeb starpower for the opening. Someone who is well-known to have the most discerning tastes; someone whose reputation for accepting nothing less than the best and finest goes unquestioned. That is: you may want to bring in a Diva. Yes, with a capital D.
And who screams Diva more than anyone? Um, Mariah Carey. Duh.
Page Six tipped us off to the news that Miss Mariah spent her Memorial Day-ish weekend with her husbie Nick Cannon in Turkey, where she was paid a hot $1.5 million to sing at the opening of the Mardan Palace Hotel in Antalya last week (where the other half of the entertainment was covered by Tom Jones). The Mardan Palace is supposedly touted as Turkey's first luxe destination resort, boasting an amphitheater, a botanical garden, a fleet of luxury cars, insane water features, and a massive spa.
Rates at the Mardan Palace start at 260 Euros, and — bonus — some beds at the hotel have already been slept on by Sharon Stone, Richard Gere, and Heidi Klum, who were flown in for the massive opening gala as well.
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The Marmara Antalya's 'Revolving Loft' :: A Room With a View. And Another View. And Another View.
While we are on the topic of hotel room views today....
In this fast-paced superlative-chasing world of ours--best, fastest, wildest--we were recently pleasantly surprised to find a new-to-us hotel that claims to be a first. The Marmara Antalya, on the Mediterranean in Anatalya, Turkey, bills itself as the world's very first revolving hotel.
Talk about a room with a view. Make that multiple views. The Marmara Anatalya's "Revolving Loft" is a 24-room wing that rotates between two and 22 times every 24 hours. For those who prefer stationery digs, the hotel's 208-room main building sits perfectly still 24-7.
