Hjalti á Lava was searching his iPhone for a Bible app when he stumbled across Church Online, a service of Web site LifeChurch.tv. Soon he was regularly logging into the Oklahoma-based cyber-church -- some 4,100 miles away from á Lava's home in the Faroe Islands, west of Norway.
Did you make bubble-era investments that left you so far underwater you needed a submarine? If so, you've got company. Gather round, and I'll show you how some of the smartest and richest folks in America lost more than half a billion dollars by buying into the commercial real-estate bubble in the summer of 2007.
What was Hyatt thinking? That no one would notice? That no one would care? Well, the privately held hotelier, which announced plans recently to go public, screwed up big-time; everybody knows that now. Even Hyatt knows, although something tells me it hasn't completely sunk in yet.
You don't have to stay at these tony hotels to experience the best of their lobbies.
After a six-month hiatus of initial public offerings, the market looks to be heating up.
The visiting kids are shy about meeting the Arizona locals until Lance, Bailey and Sonora start showing off their tricks, wowing their young guests.
Last year, downtown Atlanta lost a convention to another Southern city because the visiting group perceived the other city as "greener" than Atlanta. The loss propelled Holly Elmore into action.
In the lodging world, green has gone mainstream. Once chided for being wasteful, the big hotel chains are now constantly trying to one-up each other with smart eco-design upgrades and stringent water and energy conservation policies.
If you tirelessly rack up frequent-flier miles only to encounter snags when you try to redeem them, it's time you discovered the increasingly generous world of hotel reward programs. Short on both business and leisure travelers of late, hotel chains are doing whatever it takes to fill their beds.
• Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, ordering practically everything on the menu during their family style meal at the Blue Duck Tavern inside Washington, D.C.'s Park Hyatt. Country's first couple dined with Bruce Springsteen, Tom Hanks and wife Rita Wilson, among other guests, and they started their meal with a plate of sliced meat. "The servers put everything in the middle of the table, and they devoured it," a source tells us. After the steak dinner, Hanks made sure to stop by the restaurant's open kitchen and give his compliments to the chef. Says the source: "Everyone was having such a great time; they were very upbeat."
Hjalti á Lava was searching his iPhone for a Bible app when he stumbled across Church Online, a service of Web site LifeChurch.tv. Soon he was regularly logging into the Oklahoma-based cyber-church -- some 4,100 miles away from á Lava's home in the Faroe Islands, west of Norway.
Did you make bubble-era investments that left you so far underwater you needed a submarine? If so, you've got company. Gather round, and I'll show you how some of the smartest and richest folks in America lost more than half a billion dollars by buying into the commercial real-estate bubble in the summer of 2007.
What was Hyatt thinking? That no one would notice? That no one would care? Well, the privately held hotelier, which announced plans recently to go public, screwed up big-time; everybody knows that now. Even Hyatt knows, although something tells me it hasn't completely sunk in yet.
You don't have to stay at these tony hotels to experience the best of their lobbies.
After a six-month hiatus of initial public offerings, the market looks to be heating up.
The visiting kids are shy about meeting the Arizona locals until Lance, Bailey and Sonora start showing off their tricks, wowing their young guests.
Last year, downtown Atlanta lost a convention to another Southern city because the visiting group perceived the other city as "greener" than Atlanta. The loss propelled Holly Elmore into action.
In the lodging world, green has gone mainstream. Once chided for being wasteful, the big hotel chains are now constantly trying to one-up each other with smart eco-design upgrades and stringent water and energy conservation policies.
If you tirelessly rack up frequent-flier miles only to encounter snags when you try to redeem them, it's time you discovered the increasingly generous world of hotel reward programs. Short on both business and leisure travelers of late, hotel chains are doing whatever it takes to fill their beds.
• Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, ordering practically everything on the menu during their family style meal at the Blue Duck Tavern inside Washington, D.C.'s Park Hyatt. Country's first couple dined with Bruce Springsteen, Tom Hanks and wife Rita Wilson, among other guests, and they started their meal with a plate of sliced meat. "The servers put everything in the middle of the table, and they devoured it," a source tells us. After the steak dinner, Hanks made sure to stop by the restaurant's open kitchen and give his compliments to the chef. Says the source: "Everyone was having such a great time; they were very upbeat."
The fluctuations in the economy may change a lot of things, but one thing that remains the same is the desire to explore new places and experience new cultures.
Ryan Libbey, 10, was in vacation heaven.
Lower-priced hotels have long been the realm of Muzak-filled lobbies outfitted with worse-for-wear furniture and industrial carpeting. But the genre has entered a new era. A wine bar? A sleek lounge area? Free Wi-Fi?
New York, London and Hong Kong are the business hubs of the global economy. All major banks have their headquarters or offices in these cities and it's the same for the hotel industry.
Good thing Scott McNealy is a champion catnapper. The Silicon Valley veteran, who led Sun Microsystems as CEO for 22 years before stepping down in 2006, is traveling more than ever before in his current role as chairman. As he circles the world to meet with customers, partners, and employees, he books up to 15 appointments a day - and catches up on sleep wherever he can, often in a sales rep's car. Add to that his work on behalf of nonprofit Curriki, a wiki site for kindergarten-through-12 curriculums that began as a project at Sun, and McNealy spends about a third of the year in transit. We caught up with him on a recent trip to Washington, D.C., and talked travel as his car sped across town between meetings.
Most folks thought the whole idea of "user-generated content" was kind of silly when Al Gore and his business partner Joel Hyatt started talking about it a few years ago.
Feel like life's a treadmill, but you never see a real one? Running between meetings, but never around the park? Do you stretch out meetings, but never your legs? Exercise and healthy eating are often the first things to fall off the agenda when on the road. But, as experts point out, an unhealthy lifestyle can affect productivity, concentration, happiness and stress levels.
Hotel loyalty programs have come a long way since they were introduced a quarter century ago by Holiday Inn. Initially viewed as the ugly stepsister of airlines' frequent-flier plans, they have shed their dowdy image, and points have become highly desirable.
Traditionally, an extended-stay hotel was little more than a motel with big rooms, tiny kitchens and discounts for guests staying awhile. Realizing just how lucrative the business-travel market is, major hotel corporations are jumping in.
TROSCAN DESIGN
A day after they married in a low-key civil ceremony in a Paris City Hall, Eva Longoria and Tony Parker have done it again - this time in a church.
The hotel industry is flush. After years of cutbacks, corporate travel budgets are expanding, and the resulting increase in demand has allowed room rates to climb at twice the rate of inflation. But it's also spurred competition among hoteliers to cater to their clients' every whim. The popularity of boutique hotels, meanwhile, is motivating even the biggest chains to pitch their individuality—and how better to do that than to put their best services forward? Here are the biggest trends in $200-a-night pampering.
It used to be that women would get dolled up at home and then head out for a night on the town. But these days, spas and salons are hoping women will bring the party to them.
Not again!
On a recent business trip to San Diego, California, Kurt Barrett took his family to Sea World.
Here are the fitness offerings from a sampling of major hotel chains:
Last year "unmanaged" business travel hit a new high. Translation: Unless you work at some big honking company, chances are you're stuck booking your own trips. (And if you own your own company, pa...
How can hoteliers best serve the road warrior of 2025? What technology will future tourists expect in their Travelodge? Those are the questions that led Chicago-based design firm Gettys and the Hos...
My serious playoff action on the road began with a lonely trip to Indianapolis and ended in the rain in Miami. Why was the Indy trip lonely? Because usually the Flaming Redhead makes these journeys with me, at least to the Championship round, but there were one-thousand-one-hundred-and-forty-eight reasons why she didn't make this one. That's right, $1,148 was what Continental Airlines wanted, round trip from Newark, when you don't book at least a week in advance.
A few months ago, I had to go to the Big Island of Hawaii for a last-minute assignment. I called the Fairmont Orchid to book a room for that evening. When the reservation agent asked for my President's Club number, I told her I wasn't a member. After all, I'm rarely lucky enough to stay in such luxurious digs, and I assumed there was an annual fee or some other requirement. The agent informed me that the lowest of Fairmont's three-tier memberships is complimentary, adding, "There are several in-hotel benefits available on your first stay after enrolling."
When reports of Lake Tahoe's beauty filtered down to wealthy San Franciscans in the 1920s, vacation homes and lodges shot up on prime lakeshore lots as fast as they could be built. The construction material of choice? The log, naturally. Some of these cabins are still standing -- others have been constructed in a similar style. Almost all are open in winter, and are far more luxurious than their predecessors. Here are our picks.
me of the most successful real estate companies have started as alliances of friends and family. Orange County, Calif. megadeveloper the Irvine Company was created in the 19th century by James Irvine and his son. Donald Trump's dad Fred taught his Apprentice plenty about the family biz. Chicago real estate guru Sam Zell credits much of his success to his longtime partnership with his college pal, the late Robert Lurie. (Old John D.'s spawn didn't fare too badly either with a family venture in the 1930s called Rockefeller Center.) ...
Dozens of people were killed and more than 150 wounded in three suspected suicide blasts Wednesday night in or near downtown hotels, all of which were part of U.S.-based chains, officials said.
Three apparent suicide attackers detonated nearly simultaneous explosions Wednesday night at hotels in downtown Amman, Jordan, killing at least 67 people and wounding more than 150 others, the deputy prime minister of Jordan said.
John D. Rockefeller once said that "a friendship founded on business...is a good deal better than a business founded on friendship." He might have added: "Except in real estate." That's because som...
John D. Rockefeller once said that "a friendship founded on business...is a good deal better than a business founded on friendship."
It's after midnight in Chicago, and Tom Pritzker looks totally wiped. He spent today running the family's hotel, industrial, finance, and real estate empire, said to be worth more than $15 billion. Tonight he has hosted an awards ceremony and dinner for the Pritzker Prize, the so-called Nobel Prize for architecture. Now it's the afterparty at the bar of one of the family's newest hotels, the Park Hyatt Chicago. The room is narrow, with high ceilings, large windows, and dark wood floors--basically a wide hallway that doubles as a watering hole. Moving from table to table, Tom and his cousin Nick, the family real estate guru, bump into a friend, architect Frank Gehry. "You know, I really have always hated this hotel," Gehry says, only half-jokingly, about the building's design. "When are you going to let me design one of your new hotels?" Tom shakes his hand with a smile and slight chuckle. "Don't worry, Frank," he says. "We'll find you a great project. We're building a lot these days." It's big news to hea
In a continuing effort to save money, hotel chains are changing sheets for their customers less frequently, sometimes only weekly, according to a published report Tuesday.
It's as lively as the sound of a flamenco guitar and as romantic as a love song. The minute you step onto San Antonio's River Walk, it wraps you in its spell.
It's always on your mind: the next business trip. But what you're thinking about is closing the next deal--not the mundane details of your travel arrangements. So we've done that for you. Our down-...
Is a Hyatt Hotels IPO on the horizon? That's what many Wall Street watchers are asking in the wake of the estimated $900 million settlement in early January between the Pritzker clan and two young ...
We asked those affected by Hurricane Ivan, or those in its path, to e-mail us with their thoughts and experiences. The following are a selection of your replies.
A company headed by former Vice President Al Gore has bought a cable television network with the vision of remaking it into a network aimed at young adults, the group announced Tuesday.
You have to excuse movie fans if they confuse "Lost in Translation" for a glorified commercial for Tokyo's Park Hyatt Hotel.
Sofia Coppola's new film, Lost in Translation, starring Bill Murray as a jet-lagged actor shooting a whiskey ad in Japan, has won rave reviews. Now the Park Hyatt in Tokyo, where the movie was film...
Champagne on arrival. Complimentary massages. Sorbet and fresh fruit by the pool. The Caribbean's high-end resorts are racing to outdo each other in the no-request-is-too-large world of exceptional service.
My friends who dabble in the black art of marketing have a word they reserve for those they really want to insult: ASPIRATIONAL. The new Park Hyatt, steps from the Place Vendome, is just that. I ap...
Columbia University freshman and Hyatt heiress Liesel Pritzker, 18, has a busy spring ahead. She's suing her dad, Robert, and other family members for allegedly siphoning more than $1 billion from ...
BOUTIQUE HOTELS Boutiques' slick design and model-pretty staffs defined urban cool in the 1990s, but they've been hard hit by the travel slowdown. While "sale" is a dirty word in the boutique busin...
In recent years, fiscal restraint and balanced budgets were perceived to be the ultimate measures of good government. The government ran a budget surplus from 1998 to 2000. Overnight, all that has ...
I'm Hong Kong-bound to meet with Rupert, Wendi, and my tailor when I discover that my temporary secretary booked me into the Grand Hyatt instead of my beloved Peninsula. One step into the flashy, s...
It was huge! That was Emily Arroyo's verdict when she first laid eyes on the $250,000 state-of-the-art industrial kitchen that Hyatt Corp. installed in 1990 on the eighth floor of Chicago's predomi...
Forget about switching your broker or your gym. Why not usher in a new millennium with a far more radical change--a new identity? According to a slew of somewhat bizarre websites, the idea is shock...
It's the kind of mixed blessing that characterizes so many modern conveniences: On the plus side, airports now offer the kinds of goods, services and food that were once available everywhere but ai...
Getting the entrepreneurial bug, are you? Tired of reading about all these pubescent little CEOs who did nothing more clever than sell books or airline tickets over the Internet and made a billion?...
Every frequent traveler knows that if you often fly the same airline, stay at the same hotel chain or rent from the same car agency, you'll be rewarded for your loyalty with miles or points good fo...
1. The new Lincoln Town Car. I get to LAX and there it is, gleaming at the curb. A complete redesign of the basic box Dean Martin rode in. A rounded snout. Heavy duty grillwork. My driver isn't a t...
Sunbathing on the beach may look sublime in travel ads, but enough of today's multitasking executives want to do more on their weekends away than get a tan, which helps explain the growing populari...
A good hotel is a surrogate mother and business partner rolled into one. At the top chains, you're paying for a blend of pampering and no-nonsense service that should leverage your time in hundreds...
If you've planned your upcoming vacation wisely--by traveling in the off-season or by signing up for cheap fly/drive deals, for example--congratulations. You've already saved quite a bit of cash. B...
The by-the-book research wonks at Marriott knew something strange was going on when business travelers rejected spacious accommodations in king-bed rooms and instead requested the comparatively cra...
So this is the summer you promised to pack the kids in the car for that long trek to Grandma's, the Grand Canyon or Disney World. (Oh, the things you do for your family.) We figured the least we ca...
Back when planes had props and cars had fins, a vacationing family snapshot included a breadwinner dad, a homemaker mom and two-plus kids. Fast-forward, however, and half the people in that picture...
''RUNNING this company the past three years has taken ten years off my life,'' says Darryl Hartley-Leonard, president of Hyatt Hotels. ''But I hope to get rejuvenated during the next three.'' It's ...
Delivering sloppy service is always shortsighted. According to Forum Corp., a Boston-based consulting firm, the typical consumer tells nine people about a bad experience before he or she ever tells...
You're no doubt familiar with frequent-flier plans. YNow get ready for a new twist: frequent-buyer programs that reward you with everything from free travel to -- get this -- annuities if you buy s...
DUANE HYATT, 54, A MACHINE AND SUPPLIES TESTER for Xerox, is spending nine months volunteering full time at a Rochester, N.Y. women's shelter -- while Xerox pays his full salary and benefits. Marti...
With U.S. occupancy rates hovering at 61%, hotels and resorts are eager to please. Inspired by the new air fares (see page 29), Boston-based ITT Sheraton recently simplified its rate structure -- a...
UNTIL four months ago, David Donaldson sold boilers for Asea Brown Boveri, a $29-billion-a-year Swiss-based industrial equipment manufacturer with rapidly expanding operations in the U.S. After 30 ...
To discover this summer's best vacation options, we invited a half-dozen key industry execs to a freewheeling Q&A roundtable. The experts: Roger Ballou, president of American Express Travel Service...
WHEN package designer Marc Rosen plans trips now, he always asks his travel agent about hotels with the best discounts. Rosen, whose clients include Colgate-Palmolive and Rayovac batteries, favors ...
Buy a house, divorce your wife, get arrested even . . . You won't have to shell out a dime in lawyers' fees if you work at one of the growing number of companies that offer free legal benefits to t...
When flights are canceled or hotels are overbooked, it's now often up to travelers to find alternatives. ''With all the airline mergers and consolidation,'' says Watts Wacker, at Yankelovich Clancy...
Even considering that she earned an economics degree at Harvard and law and business degrees from Stanford, Penny Sue Pritzker landed herself a pretty nifty first job. She started as a full partner...
TIME WAS, making it into the managerial ranks used to mean something: a sense of accomplishment, a bit more confidence about the future, greater identification of oneself with one's employer. Not s...
A comfortable bed and a clean room, yes. But don't be surprised if some of the other niceties you've come to expect from hotels are missing next time you check in. For example, don't look for a sho...
Hotels may have eased up on in-room phone charges, but they're still racking up big fax fees. At the two dozen hotels we surveyed nationwide, budget to luxe, prices ranged from $1 to $10 for sendin...
The trend toward shorter but sweeter trips (see Travel Wise, June 1990) is going strong -- three or fewer nights was the average for more than 50% of 1989 vacations. Add that demand to the slowdown...
Despite the crowds, if you decide to travel to the Caribbean, here's the news: hotels that were damaged by Hurricane Hugo are refurbished now, and the just- opened resorts are eager. Hyatt will pic...
A little-known inventor from suburban Los Angeles has managed to jolt the entire computer industry. After a 22-year fight with the U.S. Patent Office, Gilbert Hyatt, 52, won a patent for his design...
It's smart to spend August planning your free frequent-flier travel for the rest of the year. Program changes are in the works and year-end deadlines, such as America West's car-rental awards, are ...
A growing number of execs are packing up the kids as well as their carry-ons before hitting the road. Nearly one in seven business trips now includes children, according to the US Travel Data Cente...
If you want a higher return than you can get from most money-market funds, you could lock in top yields with solid short-term corporate bond funds such as Vanguard Fixed Income Short-Term (8.6% yie...
From high atop San Francisco's fashionable Mark Hopkins Intercontinental Hotel comes the midnight cry of the wedding party: ''Bring on the tequila poppers, waiter! We want tequila poppers!'' It was...
THE HOTEL GLUT has business travelers benefiting richly from the forces of supply and demand. Service is up but prices are not. Hostelries ranging from budget to best-in-town have plunged into an a...
Brace yourself for another restructuring -- in compensation. Says Steven Gross, a vice president of Hay Group, a Philadelphia management consulting firm: ''In the Nineties corporations will adopt a...
The 1990 college graduate faces one of the tightest job markets in almost a decade. The number of entry-level positions is expected to decline by 13.3%, the steepest drop since recession-plagued 19...
TODAY, as CEOs waken to the new dawn of participatory management and even slugabeds are heard to murmur ''empowerment'' in their sleep, there is reason to believe that their heretofore faithful ret...
Hyatt Hotels closed its Chicago headquarters for a day in late September and dispatched its 375 corporate employees to the chain's 98 inns around the country to make beds, carry luggage, and otherw...
LEW FRANKFORT, 43 COACH LEATHERWARE INC. When the founder of this handbag company approached Frankfort, then the commissioner of New York City's agency for child development, it wasn't to talk poli...
How much you earn on the job depends mostly on your own ability and hard work. What happens to that money, however, often hinges on the quality of the advisers you pick to help you manage your fina...
In the race for higher returns, the little built-in costs of investing -- fees and commissions -- can hold you back as effectively as 10-pound weights strapped to your ankles. Consider the stock ma...
You never could take it with you. Even leaving it behind to the presumably grateful loved ones of your choice requires careful planning. Tax reforms over the past decade did not close the ''death l...
THOMAS J. PRITZKER, of the quietly wealthy Chicago clan that owns Hyatt Corp., Braniff, and a score of other important businesses, stood at a pay phone in the lobby of a Chinese restaurant in New Y...
Of 30 companies planning to go public in January, 29 postponed their offerings. -- New York City's Grand Hyatt is offering a lavish Valentine weekend for two for $10,000 -- not counting gratuities....
Vacationing families with children may find better-than-usual bargains on the road this summer. Reason: three big luxury hotel chains are trying to offset the summertime lag in business travel by o...
You know how it goes some days: Your landlord refuses to fix the dripping faucet that kept you awake last night. Your VCR turns your favorite tape into spaghetti. And the contract your carpenter se...
The tax consultant your brother-in-law recommended so highly has skipped town -- and left you facing an IRS claim for $10,000 in back taxes. You need an attorney, and fast. But the only one you kno...
Mother Nature's ability to wreak havoc, demonstrated anew in the Mexican earthquake, will undoubtedly whip up demand for a service little known outside the construction trade. The testing of buildi...
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