We are living in a golden age of dining, so why are we still dealing with traditional three meal restaurants in hotels? In 2016, I think it's fair to say that dining and restaurants have firmly entrenched themselves as key players in our culture. Chefs have long established themselves as members of the celebrity class. Every major network seemingly has some sort of cooking, travel or food related show. And hundreds and thousands of blogs, yelp channels, instagram feeds, and publications are dedicated to tracking, celebrating, and recreating it all. More important, rising costs in major cities, a sustained interest in local products, READ MORE

After striking silver in Nevada and becoming one of the wealthiest men in the world, James Fair, an ambitious Irish immigrant, aspired to build a palatial residence in San Francisco atop Nob Hill. Almost 40 years later, his daughters, Tessie Fair Oelrichs and Birdie Fair Vanderbilt, decided to build a grand hotel on the “Fair Mount” to honor their late father, who had acquired the premier property decades earlier. The hotel was within days of being completed when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit the Bay Area on April 18, 1906. Fires that followed ravaged more than 80 percent of the city, including the interiors of the Fairmont, but the grand marble and white granite shell survived, standing high on the hill as a beacon of hope for all of San Francisco. The owners vowed to restore the hotel and open it a year later—which they did. READ MORE

Re-brand; re-fresh, re-position, re-frame, re-articulate, re-contextualize - an entire universe of “do-it-again-branding” to confuse, confound, and just plain con hotel owners, operators and marketers. The reason is not complicated: Branding is an ongoing process, and as tastes competitive environment changes, so must the hotel's brand change. The question is: how much does the brand need to change, and how profound does the change have to be. In other words, is a re-brand, re-positioning, refreshing, re-articulation or re-what? In this article we look at the differences between the re's and when which is appropriate. READ MORE

Imagine a hotel meeting space that you'd walk into a decade or two ago. Do you see a 3,000-to-5,000-square-foot ballroom designed to seat hundreds of people, along with a patterned carpet and crystal chandeliers? Partitioned walls that subdivide the room to create secondary meeting spaces for smaller events and meetings? Do you conjure up an image of a boardroom for a dozen or two executives, with the requisite large oval table and leather chairs? A vanilla pre-function room for registration before an event and maybe a cocktail after? READ MORE

When selecting renovation contractors, many hotel owners' and property managers' decisions are based solely on the bottom line. In short, the lowest price bidder wins. Other hotel owners and managers, however, carefully consider the intricacies of their project's scope and can assess the confidence they have in their selected contractor that the renovation can be finished on-time and on-budget. What these hotel owners appreciate that others don't are the many value-added, non-financial advantages that a talented contractor brings to the project. READ MORE