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How Hotels Pick the Hot Places to Go

Could Hoboken be the next luxury travel hotspot?

An intriguing August article from the Wall Street Journal is now online: The Search for the Next Hot Spot. It's a profile on several powerful travel industry executives who get to decide where their company will build their next luxury hotel.

Since they're looking years into the future in terms of completion, they are essentially making a big bet on whether a place will become the hot place to go in five years or not. They don't just sit back and wait for the crowds to decide for themselves of course. "Building a 200-room luxury property can cost $100 million" so the stakes are high. A little PR goosing is required.

Adrian Zecha, of Aman Resorts, "was partly responsible for putting Cambodia on the luxury travel map when he opened an outpost there in 2002." Some others don't turn out so well, like the Four Seasons in Beirut. (Now scheduled for 2008.)

So what are we going to be reading about in all the glossy travel magazines in the future? If W gets their way, it will be Doha or Moscow, and even Hoboken, New Jersey which is getting a W Hotel there next year. Ritz-Carlton is looking at Almaty, Kazakhstan and Crystal Cruises is hot on Sarande, Albania.

While we love the idea of exploring new places sometimes we feel like "picking new hotspots" is just another way to please overzealous developers who are only in the hotel biz to make a (few million) bucks.

Related Stories:
· The Search for the Next Hot Spot [WSJ]