Now that we know how pricey Bobby DeNiro's hotel will be ($725 a night!), it's time to wonder, "Where can we put that much money to good use?" First, a couple NYC options.
Good old Six Columbus has a King Suite available for $625, which is the property's priciest room. It comes with all the standard amenities plus two flat screen TVs and, of course, tons of square footage. Suites at The Bowery Hotel go for $750, where you get hardwood floors, 400 thread count sheets, marble bathrooms and other niceties like outdoor terraces with jacuzzis. The priciest suite at the Duane Street Hotel, in TriBeCa like DeNiro's place, is a "cheap" $536.
But why stop at just Manhattan? If you're gonna be throwing around this much coin, you might as well go somewhere far, far away. You can stay at the Explora Atacama for four nights for $3,140, which works out to $785 a night. Or you could explore Uruguay and Argentina from the Four Seasons Resort Carmelo, where giant riverview bungalows start at under $400 a night. That should leave some cash to refuel your private jet, rock star!
Reps for Six Columbus, the eternally unopened Manhattan hotel, have told us that the hotel would like to go after a high-end business traveler. But if this is the kind of group the hotel is targeting, they may want to consider lowering the rates.
According to a July 3 article in the Wall Street Journal, "This year more than 76 percent of employers say they are booking fewer luxury hotels in favor of midclass properties."
Titled Business Travel, Downgraded, the article provides anecdotes of business travelers sleeping on friend's sofas, doubling up in rooms, and downgrading to much cheaper hotels. Meaning intstead of a Four Seasons or a Thompson Hotel, biz travelers will be hitting up Doubletree or Embassy Suites.
It's not hard to see why. Hotel rates are up 19.2 percent in the U.S. since the end of 2004, 7.2 percent of that just last year. And rates are expected to rise another 6 percent this year.
It's even worse internationally: London prices are up 30.3 percent in dollar terms and forget any thoughts of Asia being cheap. "Mumbai, India has seen a rise of 48.8 percent over the same period and Singapore's has climbed 32.9 percent." Ouch.
People tend to ask us a lot of hotel rate related questions--go figure.
Seeing that we love to help, or at least feign helpfulness, we figured we would take you through our case study of booking a hotel in downtown New York.
No single source will always net you the lowest hotel rate, as always, caveat emptor.
In our case we knew where we were staying: Soho Grand. Futhermore, our date was not flexible, October 24th was a must.
With this in mind we used three online methods and one analog method to book our room. Results post click.
