Hotel Northland to take guests in 2019

Hotel News -- Restoring Green Bay's Hotel Northland is going to take a bit more time than expected, the hotel announced Friday. The project to restore the 90-year-old building as a hotel began in 2016. Searching for specific parts has drawn out the process, construction officials say. “Many of the hotel’s original architectural elements simply can’t be duplicated today causing us to scour the country and beyond for a variety of replacement parts and pieces,” explained Executive Vice President Kelly Schleif of Ganther Construction. Those challenges have prompted the hotel to take guests sometime next year, rather than by the end of 2018 as some had hoped. “We are going to take whatever time is necessary to finish it properly to make sure everything is exactly as everyone in the community expects it to be. And then we are going to open the doors," said General Manager John D. Williams. Williams is leading the project. Until then, the Poke the Bear restuarant at the hotel is set to open December 20 at 11 a.m. It will be open Tuesday through Saturday, serving lunch, dinner, and cocktails from 11 a.m. until 7 p.m. The new bar and restaurant will expand its hours and days of service with the coming new year. Poke the Bear guests should enter at the hotel’s entrance at 304 N. Adams Street.

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Check out the top 5 ski hotels opening their doors in 2019

There’s a certain chic to the idea of a ski chalet, a resort on the cusp of a mountain where glamorous folks carve their way down black diamond runs all day and warming themselves with wine and hot beverages by a fire each night. These sorts of luxury accommodations are a backbone of the hospitality industry within some of the most popular travel destinations in the world, particularly in places like Europe and parts of North America. With their cache and relation to winter sports, they essentially never go out of style. It perhaps comes as little surprise that information from the TOPHOTELPROJECTS database shows that 2019 will be another great year for new ski resort properties across the globe. Without further adieu, here are five of the top ski hotels opening in 2019 and beyond, as per TOPHOTELCONSTRUCTION: Andermatt Swiss Alps Andermatt is a year-round destination in the heart of the Swiss Alps. The Andermatt Swiss Alps resort is currently being developed with the likelihood of opening in late 2018 or early 2019. The complete resort will include six 4 and 5-star hotels, 490 apartments in 42 buildings, about 25 chalets, convention facilities as well as an indoor pool and an 18-hole golf course. In addition, the Andermatt and Sedrun ski areas are being merged into the attractive Andermatt-Sedrun ski destinations. The first of the six hotels, the Chedi Andermatt, has been opened since December 2013. This project stands to yield 844 new rooms.

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Hotelchamp introduces AI Autopilot, aims to focus on personalized experience to take on Booking.com and Expedia

Hotelchamp, an Amsterdam-based startup has introduced a new technology called Autopilot. This new technology is set to revolutionize the way hotels think about their online guest experience. It is an AI (Artificial Intelligence) engine, which is trained to recognize and personalize the experience of visitors to a hotel’s website. Kristian Valk, the founder, and CEO of the Dutch startup Hotelchamp states that hotel websites provide a static experience for the visitors. This is bizarre given the different guests who visit these sites and their varied preferences. This is what the startup intends to change with the introduction of Autopilot. Without further ado, let’s see how Hotelchap aims to take over Booking.com and Expedia with its new AI feature. Hotelchamp intends to help hoteliers by providing a better experience to the guests. It is aimed at scaling up quickly and growing at a hyper-fast pace. Enhancing the experience of the guests comes with personalization. In fact, personalization is something that guests expect from hotels and it is a challenge to deliver that on a website in a meaningful way, claimed Valk. This is where AI comes to the picture. Artificial Intelligence can deliver a truly adaptive website experience, which is customized to every single visitor. It brings the right information or interaction to the right person at the right time, he added. The newly launched Autopilot is more than a chatbot. It customizes the static hotel websites by deploying a range of marketing techniques and tools. As it is seamlessly integrated, it offers a more lively, responsive and personalized experience. Furthermore, it guides guests throughout the direct booking process based on their requirements. Hotelchamp’s data science team has used their years of data and millions of A/B test impressions on developing Autopilot. They have used all these data to know what convinces guests to book directly. The new technology applies this knowledge against factors such as real-time data from the hotel’s website, best practices from thousands of hotels and GDPR-compliant visitor insights as well as behavior. Hoteliers just have to activate Autopilot with a single switch and the rest is assured.

300 Room Hilton Garden Inn Washington D.C. Downtown Sold For $128 Million

Xenia Hotels & Resorts, Inc. (NYSE: XHR) today announced it has sold the 300-room Hilton Garden Inn Washington D.C. Downtown for $128 million, or approximately $427,000 per key.  The sale price represents a 15.2x multiple and a 5.8% capitalization rate on the hotel's trailing twelve month Hotel EBITDA and net operating income as of October 31, 2018, respectively. "We are pleased to have completed the sale of Hilton Garden Inn Washington D.C. Downtown," commented Marcel Verbaas, Xenia's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. "The sale of this select-service hotel at an attractive valuation further exemplifies our dedication to upgrading the quality of our portfolio by making targeted investments and completing selective dispositions consistent with our long-term investment strategy of primarily owning high-quality luxury and upper upscale hotels in top 25 U.S. lodging markets and key leisure destinations." After the completion of this disposition and the addition of the recently acquired Park Hyatt Aviara Resort, Golf Club & Spa, Xenia's portfolio consists of 40 high-quality hotels located in strong lodging markets with a diversity of demand generators, with its 11 luxury hotels and 27 upper upscale hotels representing 24% and 72%, respectively, of its total room count. "We remain bullish on the long-term strength of the greater Washington D.C. market, and particularly the Northern Virginia market, as evidenced by our acquisition of The Ritz-Carlton, Pentagon City, in Arlington, Virginia, in 2017 and our continued ownership of the recently renovated Lorien Hotel in Alexandria, Virginia. We expect both hotels to benefit greatly from the vibrant economic climate in the area, including the recently announced addition of one of Amazon's headquarter locations," said Mr. Verbaas. "However, this sale represents another step in the evolution of our portfolio as we continue to upgrade the quality of our asset base while opportunistically harvesting value through timely dispositions. With the completion of this disposition, we have created additional balance sheet flexibility to take advantage of on-strategy acquisition opportunities as they arise." Proceeds from the sale will be utilized for general corporate purposes which may include debt repayments, acquisitions consistent with the Company's long-term strategy, and share repurchases under the Company's existing authorization..

Saudi government paid for rooms at Trump's DC hotel

A lobbying firm backed by Saudi Arabia booked hundreds of rooms at the Trump International Hotel in Washington shortly after the 2016 election, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.  The firm, Qorvis/MSLGroup, "has long represented the Saudi government in the United States," according to the Post. The group booked nearly 500 nights at the hotel to house US military veterans who were invited to DC to lobby against a law the Saudis opposed, the Post said, citing veterans and organizers of the trips. "In all, the lobbyists spent more than $270,000 to house six groups of visiting veterans at the Trump hotel, which Trump still owns," the paper said. Although the bill for the rooms was footed by the Saudis, only American veterans stayed in them during trips in December 2016 and January and February 2017, according to the paper.  The Post reported that veterans were recruited to lobby lawmakers against the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which "opened the door to costly litigation alleging that the Saudi government bore some blame" for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Some of the veterans, according to the paper, didn't know they were staying in rooms paid for by the Saudis. "It made all the sense in the world, when we found out that the Saudis had paid for it," Henry Garcia, a Navy veteran from Texas who went on several of the trips, told the paper.  During previous trips, the firm had booked rooms at a hotel in Virginia, the Post reported. But lobbyists, according to the paper, said they decided to stay at the Trump-branded hotel because of its room availability and discounts it had at the time; the goal was not to patronize one of President Donald Trump's hotels.  Citing financial records, the Post said that on average, rooms at the hotel went for $768 a night around the time of the visits.  A representative from the hotel declined CNN's request for comment, and the Saudi Embassy in Washington and Qorvis/MSLGroup did not immediately respond to CNN's requests for comment. CNN previously reported on two lawsuits by DC and Maryland that claim Trump is in violation of the Constitution's ban on emoluments -- payments from foreign or domestic government entities to the president -- because of his continued interest in the Trump International Hotel. The Post reported that the payments by the Saudis have become "ammunition" in the suits.  DC and Maryland have said the Trump International Hotel's operations put other nearby hotels and entertainment properties at a competitive disadvantage and that the Trump hotel got special tax concessions. The hotel won its lease on federally owned property in 2013, well before Trump's election. On Wednesday, subpoenas served to the Trump Organization and a dozen related business entities by the attorneys general of the District of Columbia and Maryland included demands for tax documents, which, if obtained, could begin to fill out a picture of the President's finances by providing information about his main income sources.

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