Croatia Travel Guide
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Spinning Croatian Hotel Will Have Best Views For Everybody
You know how they charge a bit more for the rooms with a good view? There's one way to solve this dilemma and get no complaints about it, although it's a pretty hi-tech solution: build a rotating hotel. That's exactly what they're planning in Croatia where some spinning accommodation will be built on Šolta Island, near the city of Split.
But don't worry, it's not turning at a rate likely to make you dizzy. The design has it rotating 1.3 times per day, barely fast enough to notice at all, and at the right pace so that if you stay a few days, you'll get a different view at all times of day. It will be just a three-storey hotel and there will be a central hub including the reception, stairs and elevator that won't rotate, so you won't have to look for the front door in a different place each time.
Tags: Hotel Services / Regent Hotels / Croatia Hotels / Hotel Packages / → All Tags
Regent Esplanade Zagreb Gives Guests Private City Tours
We've long admired the view from the Regent Esplanade Zagreb in Croatia, and now we think they're offering a package to fit: the Castle Tour package. It's a combination of private tours and anything involving castles sure makes us feel that bit regal.
The deal includes two nights' accommodation in a Superior double room, with breakfast included as well as internet access. (They say it's high speed, but we have a different experience of Croatian internet access so we're not making any promises).
Tags: Hotel Openings / Kempinski Hotels / Croatia Hotels / Luxury Hotels / → All Tags
Kempinski To Drop Some Bling On Croatia
For a good few years, now, everyone’s been banging on about Croatia being the hot new Med destination. And now it’s got the Kempinksi seal of approval too – they’ve just opened the Kempinksi Hotel Adriatic on the Istrian peninsula in the north of the country as their latest pin on the board of world domination.
We approve of the choice of location – Istria (the closest bit to Italy) isn’t the most obviously touristy bit of Croatia, so presumably that will make for a nice feeling of isolation in your luxury. We also approve of the price – rooms start at €200 ($293 or Ł175), which isn’t bad compared to some of their properties – especially considering it’s a seaside resort.
The “seaside” bit sounds pretty fly, too – on a clear day, they reckon you can see Venice (only minus the hordes and the smell) across the water. Plus, you’ve got your free wifi, Bang & Olufsen TVs and three restaurants to choose from.
There you go – Croatia’s all blinged up. Definitely no excuse for not going now.
Tags: Radisson Blu Hotels / Croatia Hotels / Hotel Renvoations / Dubrovnik Hotels / → All Tags
Dubrovnik Turns Cool With A New Radisson Blu
The Radisson Blu is getting bigger: they've just opened the Radisson Blu Resort & Spa Dubrovnik on this amazing part of the Croatian coast.
If you've forgotten that Radisson Blu used to be Radisson SAS, just check out our poem which explains it all and reminds you that Radisson Blu is meant to stand for cool. This place seems to fit that bill with 201 rooms with balconies overlooking the Adriatic Sea, plus 207 apartments of various sizes including kitchenettes. Plus there's a huge spa which includes a juice bar overlooking the sea, too.
As well as some 13 bars and restaurants on site, the Radisson Blu Dubrovnik even has a gourmet fresh market where you can pick up some groceries supplied by local bakers and fishermen – if you're the kind who misses home cooking, you can even get tips from these locals on how to prepare some Croatian meals and cook up a storm in your kitchenette. If you're lazy like us, though, you'll stick to all those restaurants.
Opening rates are starting from €150 ($205) a night, which includes breakfast and free internet access. Dubrovnik is really an ideal summer destination but it stays warm longer than much of Europe so a late summer or fall vacation will still work out here.
Tags: Art Hotels / Croatia Hotels / → All Tags
Villa Vilina Tempts Visitors With Three Art Exhibitions in June
Croatian resort Villa Vilina has a neat way to give even lazy vacationers the best of both worlds: you can get your cultural, arty fix without even leaving the hotel. The month of June is peak season for their art affairs by the sounds of things, with three separate exhibitions parading through the hotel corridors.
Starting on June 5, paintings by Petra Ševeljević will form the "Parco" exhibition. Apparently her pictures are all about parks and black pine trees which seems a little quirky to us, but intriguing. Two weeks later the "Venus" exhibition opens with Petar Hranuelli's stone sculptures of "different female forms".
To finish off the big art month, Villa Vilina will host a photographic exhibition opening on June 26. Srđan Babić photographs are supposed to be pretty inspiring, but if they're not as much as you'd hoped for, the views from the pool deck will be a good substitute.
Villa Vilina is located on the small island of Lopud off the coast of Dubrovnik. Most of June falls into their shoulder season (until June 7 it's off-peak) and rates are reasonable, ranging from € 146 ($205) to € 255 ($360) depending on the suite size and the view. But the art's there for everybody.
Tags: Hotel Openings / Croatia Hotels / Boutique Hotels / → All Tags
Super-Lux For Not So Much? Try Croatia’s Lešić Dimitri Palace
You know the argument about how small a hotel has to be to qualify as boutique? Well here’s one that’ll definitely qualify: Lešić Dimitri Palace on the gorgeous medieval Korčula island in Croatia, which is opening next month, has only six rooms.
We say "rooms," but we can see why the hotel likes to call them "residences" — because even the smallest has a separate sitting area. In fact, the largest has four bedrooms and three bathrooms, plus a living room.
The building was the old bishop’s palace on Korčula — so there are a few creamy stone walls about, and the rest of the decor is simple but classy, giving those cream and greige palettes a workout. Don't confuse that for stark though – it’s themed on the Silk Road (Marco Polo was supposed to have lived on the island), so those plain colours are nicely latticed and patterned.
The hotel reckons it’ll be providing an “extremely high level of personalized service”, and because of the small number of rooms, we’re betting that they won’t be wrong. For a start, they’ve got private yachts (yup, plural) if you fancy floating round the nearby islands. Best of all are the prices. If this is as swish as it sounds, the starting rates of €180 ($248/Ł158) per night sound pretty swell to us. Better hope it lives up to expectations (and if it doesn’t, you can always private yacht it out of there).
Tags: Croatia Hotels / Hotel Renovations / Luxury Hotels / → All Tags
Super-Luxe Hotel Monte Mulini in Croatia is Shady in a Good Way
The gorgeous Croatian coast at Rovinj in the area of Istria has just gotten its first five-star hotel with the opening of the Hotel Monte Mulini — and even though it's barely springtime, this is already on our Christmas wishlist.
Amazingly, this incarnation of the hotel is a renovated version of a previous hotel that didn't get much positive feedback and was certainly a two-star shadow of the luxury they've built now. To be honest, just knowing that the hotel overlooks the Adriatic coastline with nothing but sea to be seen is enough to entice us.
But on top of that, they seem to have taken a whole heap of care with the re-design. Croatia can get seriously hot in the summer, but the designers did studies of light and shade on the windows at different times of the year to calculate the best positions and angles, and there's a curved roof specially positioned to put the hotel's walls into the shade during summer.
Tags: Killer View / Zagreb Hotel Reviews / Croatia Hotels / Regent Hotels / → All Tags
Room With a Killer View: Regent Esplanade Zagreb is Picture Perfect
We are suckers for a room with a killer view. We find that we are even more likely to forgive some minor hotel inconveniences if we can stare out the window at something pretty--yeah we are that shallow. Let's help out our fellow hotel mavens by uploading rooms with killer views to the HotelChatter/Flickr photo pool, or by sending the photo along to us. We will feature our favorites in this space from time to time. Remember to tell us the name of the hotel and the room number of the hot view.
We are definitely intrigued by the Regent Esplanade Hotel in Zagreb, Croatia, because HotelChatter readers keep mentioning it to us. Last year it was Maureen's review--very glowing, apart from a complaint about male-oriented toiletries--and now we're thanking mhodges for dropping a killer view from the Regent Esplanade into our Flickr pool.
Yep, this picture-perfect view was taken from a hotel room window of the Regent Esplanade, which actually belongs to the Radisson SAS chain, but originally dates back to 1925 when it serviced passengers arriving on the Orient Express. These days it's still just as regent but not exorbitant--nightly rates for double rooms range from €150 - €300 (US$230-$460).
[Photo: mhodges]
Tags: Zagreb Hotel Reviews / Croatia Hotels / Hotel Toiletries / Hotel Restaurants / → All Tags
Regent Esplanade in Zagreb: Great Hotel But with 'Male Oriented' Scents
Hotel Maven Maureen recently returned from the Regent Esplanade in Zagreb and was thoughtful enough to send in her review of the place.
That's the thing about us--no matter how mad we get at hotel delays, bad rates, expensive WiFi or Britney Spears, we still get all teary-eyed and misty when you care enough to send your very best or worst hotel review. So goddammit, keep 'em coming.
Tags: Luxury Hotels / Croatia Hotel Reviews / Dubrovnik Hotel Reviews / → All Tags
Jesus Makes Sushi at the Dubrovnik Palace Hotel
They call themselves Croatia's finest resort hotel. Travel bulletin board reviewers call them the 11th best hotel in Dubrovnik. So they may not be quite as good as they thought, but the Dubrovnik Palace Hotel is not a bad place to enjoy some luxury accommodation in (we think) Croatia's most gorgeous city.
Tags: Croatia Hotel Reviews / Le Meridien Hotels / → All Tags
Croatia's Le Meridien Lav Seems To Have Everything
On the spectacular Croatian coast, the Le Meridien Lav near Split has now been open in its new renovated form since January this year, and so far it's getting good feedback, rocketing to number 3 on the TripAdvisor rankings out of almost 30 Split hotels.
The biggest downside is that Lav's Le Meridien is a fair way out of the town of Split, and you either need to use a taxi, the three times daily courtesy bus, or have your own car or rental. But if you plan to stay in the hotel for most of your holiday, there are plenty of plus points: a great gym, indoor and outdoor pools as well as the private beach, and the hotel restaurant facilities are also good. Or, as one of the first guests put it:
This is a fabulous hotel that I fell in love with. I was happy to finally stay at a hotel that doesn't just 'claim' to have numerous facilities but actually does.
Oh, they even have their own casino with 140 slot machines and 8 gaming tables, just in case you run out of places to spend your money.
[Photo: JUB]
Related Stories:
· Le Meridien Opens Near Split [HotelChatter]
Tags: Cubicle Dreamin' / Croatia Hotel Reviews / Boutique Hotels / → All Tags
Cubicle Dreamin': The Pucic Palace
Cubicle Dreamin' is a feature in which we ask the hotel mavens to take some time out of their busy work day, surf the Internet, and tell us what hotel they wish they could beam themselves to right that very second--all on the slave driving companies dime, of course. Oh, like these people aren't surfing aimlessly anyway--at least now their purposeless clicking will be cobbled together into useful hotel stories--we hope. Have a destination hotel you are just dying to leave your cube for? Send the story our way.
In this episode, Hotel Maven Amanda K picks out her ideal summer getaway. Enjoy.
The European summer is on the way (I'm thinking positive). Time to start daydreaming of a cruise down the Croatian coast and a disembarkation at one of my favorite cities, Dubrovnik. You could never get away with building such a boardgame city new: all those old town walls and fortifications and the oh-so-photogenic red roofs. I'm trying to find the ultimate place to stay in Dubrovnik and at the top of my daydreaming list right now is the The Pucic Palace Hotel in the Old Town. It's a seventeenth century building which gives it just the right ambience of history, "who died here" and beauty.
The Pucic Palace is small: a boutique hotel with just nineteen rooms(that's okay, I only need one)--it won an award last year as the best boutique hotel in Croatia. Its website is about as elegant as you can get online, and while we're talking elegance, if the food can really live up to this description then I'm moving in for good:
The pleasure of fine dining is one of the most outstanding activities in the Pucic Palace. The chefs of the three dining venues integrate natural ingredients with art, intelligence, wisdom and skill, turning the culinary arts into a sensual art of living.
Need I say more?
[Photo: Jmilles]
Related Stories:
· Pucic Palace reviews [TripAdvisor]
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