Tag: crowne plaza hotels
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Some Football Players Did Very Bad Things to This Crowne Plaza Hotel Room
Update: It was these guys.
Ugh. Yet another example of professional athletes behaving badly in hotel rooms. This time it happened at the NFL Combine in Indianapolis at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. The incident took place in February but word only just came out via Yahoo! Sports. They reported:
National Football Scouting president Jeff Foster, who runs the NFL scouting combine, confirmed that a hotel room was left trashed during the February 2013 event in Indianapolis. However, Foster refused to identify the two players who shared the room for three nights, though sources have indicated that one of the two prospects is a potential first-round pick in next week's NFL draft.
So how bad was the damage? Like Lohan or Courtney Love bad with cigarette burns everywhere? Or 80s hair band bad with broken bottles of alcohol littered on the floor and TVs thrown out the window? Judging from the description below, it's a new kind of bad. Very bad:
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A Hershey Kiss, Or A Pound Of Cocaine? Take Your Pick at Crowne Plaza Times Square
NYPD cops made the bust of a lifetime last month, when 104lbs of cocaine was seized from traffickers who were staying at the Crowne Plaza Times Square (aka the hotel that sits on top of the Hershey's Store.)
The hotel's flashy facade and central location was likely seen by the traffickers as an advantage: what better than sugar-crazed tourists bustling around a Times Square hotel to throw the cops off your scent?
Except the cops were very much onto their scent.
The NY Post reports that cops had been parked outside the hotel, waiting for the traffickers to make their move. Sure enough, on October 25 at around 6pm, the first man exited the hotel, wheeling a suitcase packed with 30lbs of pure cocaine, which he then lifted into a silver BMW. And then another guy came out with an 8lb suitcase. And then another, with 66lbs. We're telling you, it was a real cocaine suitcase factory line down there last month!
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Get Famous Landmark Views on the Sly at These 7 Hotels
You know the deal: you excitedly check into a hotel in a brand new city, ready to see all the sights and take all the tours. But sightseeing doesn't come cheap, and soon enough you're blowing an extra $20 or $50 just to be shown a landmark that, with a little more planning, you might have been able to see for free from your hotel room.
PARIS— We've been a fan of Shangri-La Paris for a while now, and it was just recently, back in May, that we poked around inside an Eiffel Duplex Suite. Balcony? Check. Free WiFi? Check. Killer Eiffel Tower view? Yessir.
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Is Downtown Detroit Ready for a 400-Room Crowne Plaza?
Could there be actual good news on the horizon for Detroit and its (lack of) hotel scene? The Free Press reports that a hotel developer is working with IHG to create a Crowne Plaza Detroit in what was once the Hotel Pontchartrain/Hotel Riverside near the convention centre.
That's 413 rooms to come back onto the market possibly next year, though the bigger news is still the in-development Aloft Downtown Detroit. At 136 rooms, the Aloft won't have the bulk of the Pontchartrain, but will have a position in a landmark, Burnham-designed building and an overall fresher design.
If both plans come through, the Aloft and Crown Plaza will debut around the same time—late-ish 2013. Fingers crossed that it coincides with the beginning of a boom in interest in Detroit. We already don't mind going to hang out in Motown; now it's time for others to follow.
[Photo: Wikimedia]
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How Much Would You Pay For A Private Sauna In Your Room?
You may never have given it much thought, but for the seriously wealthy, requesting a hotel room that comes with its own private sauna can be as commonplace as checking to see whether the hotel offers free WiFi. And just like with the whole WiFi issue, certain hotels do a better job of it than others.
Like, for instance, the Crowne Plaza Orlando Downtown (we're talking about saunas now, not WiFi). A local news channel ran a piece on which Orlando hotel suites are favored by the area's richest clients, and why. Not exactly the type of article that makes you feel good about your own finances, but fun to read nonetheless. Lo and behold, on the hotel's fourteenth floor, inside the Presidential Suite, is an en-suite sauna (above), included along with a steam shower, wet bar, and spare bedroom.
Now, how much would you pay for the luxury of a sauna two steps from your bed?
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Crowne Plaza to Freshen Up, Move Up and Then Hopefully, Shine
Crowne Plaza Birmingham, UK
Have you stayed in a Crowne Plaza Hotel lately? Yeah, neither have we. But this bit of news from InterContinental Hotel Group's Annual Investors & Leadership Conference today has us thinking a CP could be in our very near future.
IHG has announced that Crowne Plaza is will undergo a three-phase repositioning strategy, starting with a new brand identity and a modern look and feel for its U.S. properties (Crowne Plaza is way savvier abroad.)
This first phase, also known as the "Freshen Up", will also expand the brand's Sleep Advantage program which offers guests rooms in designated Quiet Zones and lots of pillows to get comfy with. As we type, Crowne Plazas are already getting freshened up and the makeover should last through 2012.
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The Secret Espresso Bar of the Crowne Plaza London St. James
We'll be the first to admit that even when we aren't staying in hotels, we're all for hanging out in them. Heck, that's what the all the restaurants, bars and shops are for—guests aren't the ones having all the fun. For this reason, nothing delights us more than discovering a secret little niche, an oasis of calm within a hotel within a metropolis.
And we just found one, and we're sharing it with you because you likely feel the same way about these secret hotel places. It's The Espresso Bar at the Crowne Plaza London - St. James in London, and it's cute and quiet and just around the corner from tourist and business centers like Buckingham Palace, St. James' Park and Victoria Station.
There's no free WiFi (shame on you, Crowne Plaza), but if you'd like to take your cappuccino outside, the hotel also hides a lovely little alfresco garden you've got to walk all the way through the lobby and the hotel bar to reach.
[Photo: HotelChatter]
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Crowne Plaza Wishes You Long Love And Good Fortune
If you've always dreamed of marrying your special someone inside a Crowne Plaza, then this is without a doubt the promotion for you.
The pink-loving hotel chain is planning to wed eleven lucky couples at the Times Square property at 11am EST on November 11, 2011.
And just in case you didn't know: the address of Crowne Plaza Times Square 1605 Broadway. That's 1-6-0-5. As in, 16 minus 5 is—oh my gosh!—ELEVEN! This auspicious mini-mass-wedding will almost certainly open a powerful energy vortex into other Crowne Plaza dimensions, where no mortal has ever ventured. Needless to say, our RSVP is already in the mail.
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Could Snoring Too Loudly Get You Kicked Out of the Crowne Plaza?
This hotel guest is thankfully muffling his own snoring.
Erm...file this under uncool hotel jobs?
A few Crowne Plaza Hotels in the UK made the news last week for their "Snore Absorption" rooms which are designed to help snorers snore less and help their companions sleep more. The rooms include a bunch of snore absorption amenities like sound-absorbing headboards to muffle the echo, anti-snoring wedge pillows and white noise machines.
But now it comes out that the hotels are also employing snore monitors whose job it is to patrol the designated quiet corridors of the hotel. Reuters reports:
"Snore monitors" patrol corridors in the designated quiet zones of Crowne Plaza hotels in the cities of London, Leeds and Manchester. Their job is to listen out for offensive noises and knock on the door of guests who snore too loudly.
"We have quiet zones on two floors of the hotel. As Snore Monitor, I conduct floor walks to check for noise disruptions, paying particular attention to the quiet zone rooms," said Laura Simpson, Snore Monitor at Leeds Crowne Plaza hotel in northern England.
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Snore No More at Crowne Plazas Abroad
A belated piece of news for Sleep Week!
People who snore get no love, especially not from their bedtime partners. (Truth: we've been known to smack our snorer occasionally to get him to stop.) But now, unintentional nighttime noisemakers and their sleeping companions can seek solace at Crowne Plaza Hotels in Europe.
The brand there has created a "Snore Absorption" room that comes with soundproof walls to absorb snore vibrations, sound-absorbing headboards to muffle the echo, an anti-snoring wedge pillow to keep snorers on their sides and thus reduce the chance of snoring and lastly, the room has a white-noise machine to mask the sound of snoring.
So the room isn't quite going to cure the snorer in your life but it will help you find some peace in the middle of the night.
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The Crowne Plaza Milan's Fugly Carpeting Maybe Isn't So Fugly
What's a business hotel in a fashion city to do? First off, don't be too offensive in design to either party; that means no super modern furniture or cutting-edge technology to annoy the regular business travelers, and no boring color schemes and generic artwork to annoy the fashion folk. We actually think the Crowne Plaza Milan does a great job in this regard, and one unexpected area where this is quite apparent is the carpet.
We're going to say something super positive right here: The Crowne Plaza Milan's carpeting doesn't deserve to be in the Facebook Fugly Hotel Carpeting Group, and as far as we know, it's not been added...yet. We actually like it, as we're a mix of business and fashion folk. The brown and beige are neutral colors and althoug the swirly pattern is a super energetic one, we're not dizzy nor are we revolted by the style.
So whaddaya think? Should this carpet be relegated to the Fugly Hotel Carpet Group, or would it look better in your bedroom? Let us know in the comments!
[Photo: HotelChatter]
Hotel Safety / Milan Hotels / Crowne Plaza Hotels / → All Tags
The Crowne Plaza Milan Shares Its Street Smarts
You're in a foreign city and you've spent at least half the day traveling and you just want to sit down inside your hotel room and maybe flip open your laptop and update your Facebook status. But then...something catches your eye. It's a little sign that notes good safety precautions inside the hotel, like keeping valuables in the safe and always checking the peephole before opening your room door. But wait! It continues on to advise on proper safety outside the hotel—street smarts, if you will.
The sign above is such, and we discovered it on the desk of our room recently. Why the Crowne Plaza Milan? Well, it's a future feature in our Adventures in Blind Booking series, and it's centrally located...right in the vicinity of Milan's Stazione Centrale. Aka the domain of clueless tourists, pickpockets, rushing businessmen and other transients. Not the best place to be careless with your belongings, right? Right.
