Tag: WTF Hotel News
View All TagsRoyal Wedding Hotels / Orlando Hotels / Prince William / Kate Middleton / WTF Hotel News / Hotel Pastries / → All Tags
Kate Middleton's Tiara and Engagement Ring Now Available To Eat
With only two days left until the big day the Royal Wedding hotel events are getting sillier. Yesterday we brought you the Premier Inn's package which offers guests the chance to sleep with the couple and today it's the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin hotel who have announced the sweetest package yet.
The two-time world champion pastry chef Laurent Branlard has created exact replicas of some of the Royal Jewelery, only made from sugar. The pieces include Princess Diana’s royal tiara and the sapphire engagement ring Wills gave to Kate. We're not sure what the tiara is resting on but that yellow face looks kind of freaky!
WTF Hotel News / Hotel Sex / Hotel Chairs / Best Western Hotels / → All Tags
Watch Where You Sit at This Hotel or You Could Get Pregnant
This might just be the hardest-working hotel, um, chair in the business. Seven women claim that the receptionist's chair at the Best Western Moore Place Hotel in Milton Keynes, England got them pregnant over 18 months.
Not "got them pregnant" in a bizarro errant sperm-on-the-seat sort of way but rather, with its mysterious fertile powers." The Daily Mail reports:
Elaine Ledster, Kim Gidley, Laura Burchill and Gina Ripley were the first to fall pregnant while working as receptionists at the Best Western Moore Place Hotel.
They were swiftly followed by the three remaining receptionists, Alyce Grisley, Claire Fitchett and Seran Daines.
General manager Giles Shaw said: 'The chair is just a typical office swivel chair, but we now have staff refusing to sit on it.'
Unusual Hotels / Odd Hotels / Pop-Up Hotels / Madrid Hotels / WTF Hotel News / → All Tags
What A Load Of Garbage: The Rubbish Hotel
Where: Madrid, Spain
We’ve stayed in some gross hotels before but nothing quite as trashy as this one.
Corona’s Save The Beach Hotel is made out of 12 tons of rubbish gathered from beaches around the world. The idea behind the hotel is to raise awareness of the campaign to keep beaches litter free and stop people using the ocean as a garbage dump. However, like yesterday's trash, this hotel has already been hauled off to the junk yard.
The 'boutique' hotel was only open for four days in Madrid on January 19th but the five double rooms were fully booked for the whole time. A rubbish hotel that sells out--impressive!
WTF Hotel News / Luxury Hotels / Turkey Hotels / Hotel Woes / → All Tags
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.
WTF Hotel News / Boston Hotels / Marriott Hotels / Holiday Hotel Decorations / → All Tags
Hotel's Snowflake Decoration Breaks the Fall of Hotel Trespasser
We've been covering the wonderful, wild and weird hotel decorations going up this season but this is the first time we've heard of a hotel decoration saving someone's life, even if they were trying to break into the hotel.
Last night near Boston, a man was attempting to break into the penthouse suite of the Marriott Springfield on the 10th floor. But he ended up falling more than 70 feet, yet still survived the plunge. The Republican Newspaper has the detes on what exactly happened:
Hotel employees originally reported at about 9 p.m. that a trespasser was on the roof, police said.
The man plummeted 70 feet from the 16th floor to a ledge on the sixth floor after attempting to climb on one of the Christmas decorations.
He was not a guest at the hotel and broke a window to gain access to the roof, said Fire Department spokesman Dennis Leger.
The man climbed down onto a decoration and was clinging to it and knocking on windows asking people to let him in, but the windows on the high floors do not open.
WTF Hotel News / Hotel Rankings / Los Angeles Hotels / Travel and Leisure / Hotel News / Dorchester Collection Hotels / Hotel Renovations / → All Tags
Hotel Bel-Air Has Been Closed for a Year But It Still Made T+L's Best Hotels List
Once again, we find ourselves confused by a World's Best list from Travel + Leisure. The magazine has just released its 2011 T+L 500 guide which always makes us giddy as we love seeing which hotels are hot and which are not. But when we noticed that the best hotel in Los Angeles is the Hotel Bel-Air, it felt like someone popped the pretty balloon we had been holding. And then knocked over our ice cream too.
That's because the Hotel Bel-Air has been closed for over a year for extensive renovations. It is not expected to reopen until July.
So, how did this happen? According to T+L, the 2011 T+L 500 guide is "based on 2010 World's Best Awards readers' survey results. As part of the survey, Travel + Leisure readers rated hotels on several characteristics including rooms/facilities, location, service, restaurants/food, and value."
So this must mean that T+L readers are voting based on their pre-2010 experiences at the hotel. And we're not so sure that those experiences are ones we'd like to have.
WTF Hotel News / Movie Set Hotels / Pittsburgh Hotels / Hotel Fires / Corey Haim / → All Tags
Whoops! Detectives Investigate Hotel Murder Only To Find Out It Was a Movie Set
Given the frightful history of hotel fires, we get rather nervous whenever we see a report of one in the news but this fire at the George Washington Hotel outside Pittsburgh has us somewhat relieved.
When firefighters responded to a call at the hotel two weeks ago for a fire, they found a guestroom that looked like a grisly murder scene complete with "blood-spattered hotel room littered with bottles of alcohol and even a piece of a scalp." Creepy.
Detectives then spent eight hours analyzing the crime scene with the police chief calling it one of the worst crime scenes he's scene in his 35 years of experience. But it turns out, the room was fake.
Instead it was a leftover movie set for the horror movie, "New Terminal Hotel", starring the late actor Corey Haim. The hotel's owner decided to leave the room untouched after filming wrapped in case they needed to come back for reshoots:
Insane Hotel Packages / Lists / Hotel News / WTF Hotel News / → All Tags
The 10 Most Insane Hotel Packages Ever
Yesterday's news about a 55 million yen package at the Mandarin Oriental Tokyo got us reminiscing about other insane hotel packages that have pulled off this sort of stunt. And you know what reminiscing on the internet really means--a list!
Now, most of these insane packages have expiration dates, some of which have already passed, yet if you've really got your heart set on renting out a hotel for the night, or if you find yourself up against a Brewster's Millions type of scenario, we're sure they will find a way to accommodate you.
WTF Hotel News / Hotel Opening Rates / Sheraton Hotels / Starwood Hotels / Manhattan Hotels / Hotel Openings / → All Tags
For Real? Sheraton Tribeca's Room Rate is More Than Soho Grand or James New York
The Sheraton construction back in October 2009.
Yesterday we freaked out over Element Times Square West's opening room rates surpassing $450 a night. But we're not so thrilled about the rates at another also-delayed Starwood hotel in NYC--the Sheraton Tribeca. When it opens on November 11, rooms start at $487.90 (including tax).
Yes, these are brand new hotels and, yes, these are holiday high-seasons in New York. But seriously? Five hundred bucks for a Sheraton? It had better be a non-fugly one for that price!
Hotel Amenities / Hotel Jacuzzis / WTF Hotel News / → All Tags
WTF? Jacuzzis Top The List of What Hotel Guests Want
UPDATE: As Pete from Orbital Media (the company who analyzed this data) wrote in to tell us, this was not in fact a poll. The list was based on the number of times people have searched online for the keyword combinations "Hotel with a Jacuzzi" or "Hotel with Internet." So there you go. Plenty of people are Google-dreaming of hotel Jacuzzis, regardless of what they'd really ask for in a hotel.
Here comes a piece of hotel news that makes us say, WTF? According to research published by the Wyndham Grand London Blog, a Jacuzzi tops the list of Top Ten Things People Want in a Hotel.
We’re not sure who the researchers polled for this, but it wasn’t us. Regular HotelChatter fans know how we feel about Hotel WiFi, and in this poll the blanket “Hotel with internet” comes in a pitiful second.
Hotel WiFi / Celebrity Scoop / Lady Gaga / WTF Hotel News / Joe Germanotta / → All Tags
Lady Gaga's Papa is the Godfather of Hotel WiFi
It seems that the daddy of Lady Gaga and hotel WiFi have entered into a very good romance. We say that because in reading about the eccentric Gaga in January issue of Elle magazine, she mentions her dad's no "paper gangsta." She telles Elle:
My father is a really powerful man, a telecom guy
So how is making all this bank? He sells WiFi to hotels. (Can you hear that? That's the sound of our USB Wireless card dropping to the ground.)
Joe Germanotta started his own company, Guest WiFi, in 2002, but it's now listed as a past gig on his LinkedIn profile. He got out of the WiFi game to become the owner of House of Gaga Publishing. (We don't blame him.)
But we love that he was a pioneer of hotel WiFi early on—2002 was the dark ages of hotel WiFi. Papa Gaga even company grew to count over 70 hotels and conference centers as clients.
WTF Hotel News / New Year's Eve 2009 / Miami Hotel Mambo / → All Tags
The Nation's Most Expensive New Year's Eve Package Includes Hotel Stay and 'New Boobs'
NOTE to PR People: Anytime you put the word "boobs" in the headline of a press release, we're gonna pay attention. But this press release is so cracked out, we can't even take it seriously.
Apparently, some plastic surgeon named Dr. Stephen Greenberg will be holding a press conference in front of the W South Beach any minute now to announce "The Nation's Most Expensive New Year's Eve Package" at $100,000 which will include tickets to Lady Gaga, John Legend and Brody Jenner's New Year's Eve concerts (WTF? Brody Jenner performs?) along with first class tickets from NYC to Miami, a month-long stay at a penthouse hotel in South Beach and a set of new boobs.
Yes, new boobs. No, we're not making this up. Here's the press release:
