Neue money: NeueHouse, a members-only workspace for prominent creatives, artists and entrepreneurs, has closed a US$30 million round of growth funding led by an investment vehicle of the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Office alongside Gaw Capital and Meyer Bergman’s Revolt Ventures. (Former Equinox Hotels president Josh Wyatt was also recently named as the company’s CEO.) The funding will allow NeueHouse, which claims it has waitlists at its existing flagship locations in New York and Los Angeles, to expand, including two new locations in Los Angeles (Venice and Downtown), with longer-term ambitions for further openings in New York City as well as new sites in San Francisco, Toronto, Miami, Washington DC, Austin, Nashville, Seattle, Portland and other key North American cities.
Yes, yes it will: Based on an upward revised outlook for the U.S. economy, CBRE Hotels Americas Research is forecasting the nation’s hotels will have a 10th consecutive year of growth in 2019. According to the December 2018 edition of Hotel Horizons, U.S. hotel occupancy will rise to 66.2% next year, a fifth straight record level. The growth in occupancy is primarily the result of a projected 2.1% increase in demand, more than enough to offset an estimated net increase in supply of 1.9% for the year.
A Trump lawsuit gets dropped: A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought forward in 2017 by Washington DC-based Cork Wine Bar that claimed U.S. President Donald Trump illegally benefits from his Washington hotel and that same hotel hurts restaurants that are also near the White House. While Trump International is currently run by a trust administered by the president’s family members, it remains at the center of two other major lawsuits that allege Trump has accepted illegal payments through the business.
Another Marriott strike comes to an end: Hawaii-based hotel owner Kyo-ya has ended a 51-day strike with union workers offering up to US$6.13 per hour in pay and benefit increases over four years in a new contract. Some 2,700 workers have been on strike since Oct. 8 when negotiations reached an impasse between Local 5 workers and Kyo-ya, which owns the Marriott–managed Sheraton Waikiki, Royal Hawaiian Hotel, Westin Moana Surfrider, Sheraton Princess Kaiulani and Sheraton Maui.
Google GDPR goof? Google has been accused of flouting European data protection laws when it tracks users’ locations. A coalition of seven consumer organizations is filing complaints with local data protection regulators claiming Google used “deceptive practices” to make people turn on its different tracking systems. In addition, it alleges, Google did not give “straightforward information” about what surrendering the data entailed.
The new Winston Hotels: Three hotel executives with a combined 80 years of hotel, development, acquisition and management experience have formed Raleigh, North Carolina-based Winston Hotels, which will develop and acquire hotels across the U.S. The three executives include: Robert W. Winston III (former co-founder and CEO of the original Winston Hotels, a publicly traded hospitality REIT); Joseph V. Green (most recently president of The Preiss Company (TPCO), one of the U.S.’s largest, privately-held, student housing owner-operators); and Mathew A. Jalazo (former vice president of development for Urgo Hotels & Resorts, a Bethesda, Maryland-based hotel company).
Bye-bye baby bottles: California’s Santa Cruz County has approved a ban on small, single-use plastic bottles of personal care products in hotels, vacation rentals and other visitor accommodations. Instead, hotels would need to stock rooms with larger bottles, dispensers or another alternative — as long as the bottles are larger than 12 ounces. Hosted rentals, where the owner is present on the property, are exempt. Similar policies are already in the works at hotel chains like Marriott and Hilton. The ordinance will go into effect Dec. 31, 2020.
More from the Oroville Mercury-Register
Two Radisson additions: The Ukraina Hotel, currently named the Radison Royal Hotel, Moscow, will join the Radisson Collection in January. The 501-room hotel, which has an Olympic-sized pool and 19 F&B venues, is one of the “seven sisters” of Stalin-era high-rise architecture and was the tallest hotel in the world when it opened in 1957… Radisson Hotel Group signed another Park Inn by Radisson hotel in Iloilo, Philippines, with SM Hotels and Conventions Corp (SMHCC). The 200-room hotel is scheduled to open in Q1 2019.
Four Seasons in Tel Aviv? According to CTech, Four Seasons Hotels and New York-based Silverstein Properties is negotiating the construction of a Tel Aviv hotel. (Four Seasons had not confirmed the plan.) This would be the first of the Canada-based brand in Israel.
International arrivals up in 2018: According to the UN’s World Tourism Organization, international tourist arrivals grew 5% year-on-year in the first nine months of 2018. Asia and the Pacific led growth (+7%), followed by Europe and the Middle East (+6% each), Africa (+5%) and the Americas (+3%). Despite comparatively slower growth between July and September, UNWTO estimates that destinations worldwide received 1,083 million international arrivals through September, an additional 56 million compared with the same period of 2017.
GOPPAR high in U.S.: Profit per room at U.S. hotels were the highest of the year in October, even in the face of mounting costs, according to HotStats data tracking full-service hotels. The 3.6% year-on-year increase in October enabled hotels to push profit levels to a high of US$126.34 per available room, topping the previous high of $120.54 recorded in April. The growth was driven by an increase across all revenue centers, including rooms (up 3.2%), F&B (up 2.2%) and conference/banqueting (up 2.5%), on a per-available-room basis. ADR was US$223.36 for the month. It was also a high for the post global financial crisis era.