The world’s financial situation isn’t exactly peachy keen just yet, but the global population appears to be up for traveling. Both luxury and budget brand hotels are popping up across the world.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts, which came in at the top of its category in the recent 2013 Harris Poll EquiTrend, “expects to have enough cash in the next three years to add another global luxury brand bringing their total to ten.” 

Mitzi Gaskins, VP/global brand manager for JW Marriott, noted that the “luxury space is growing a lot” and is “anticipating 50 percent growth over the next four to five years with 79 JW hotels up and running by 2015.” Less than half of the 30 or more hotels that the brand has in the pipeline are in the United States. Gaskins told Fortune that the luxury markets that are growing fastest are “top tier destinations and gateway cities,” noting that the JW brand was opening soon in Cabo, Turks & Caicos, Macao and Hanoi, and had “just launched” in Venice.Continue reading...

Inter IKEA, the parent of IKEA, announced last summer that it was partnering with a hotelier to create a new hotel brand that oddly wouldn’t feature any of the Swedish furniture maker’s products. It’s now been confirmed at the Berlin International Hotel Investment Forum that Marriott is the partner and Moxy will be the name of the new affordable hotel chain, which plans to open 150 locations across Europe in the next decade.

“Moxy Hotels is the essence of the next generation traveler, not only Gen X and Y but people with a younger sensibility, for whom contemporary style is paramount,” said Arne Sorenson, president and CEO of Marriott International in a press release. “Every aspect of the hotel was thoughtfully researched and crafted to reflect and deliver on the changing lifestyles and expectations of this fast-growing customer segment.” 

According to TravelBite, this will be Marriott’s first budget brand in Europe. Fifty of those locations should be up and running in the next five years and Inter IKEA will be ponying up $500 million to help out, the Wall Street Journal reports. While the hotels won’t use IKEA furniture, the company has found a way to keep construction costs down in a different way: “Many of the hotels will use rooms prefabricated offsite and then assembled like IKEA furniture, a modular type of construction that is new for Marriott.”Continue reading...

The Arabian city of Dubai has become synonymous with over-the-top luxury; a fitting description for a paradise city that is home to the tallest building in the world and now the tallest hotel in the world: the JW Marriott Marquis Dubai. 

Situated in the Business Bay district, the hotel stretches 1,164 feet above the ground—just 85 feet shy of the Empire State Building. The outpost, which was officially crowned the "tallest" by the Guinness Book of World Records, is now a part of JW Marriot's 59 locations around the world. JW is the luxury arm of Marriott International, which plans to expand to 79 properties in 28 countries by 2015.Continue reading...

'1' hotels will rely on reusable materials in their construction, Starwood says...

...while the Baccarat brand will invoke the elegance of the longtime crystal manufacturer. 

It's been 13 years since private equity firm Starwood Capital Group got out of its investment in hotel giant Starwood Hotels & Resorts. But apparently, it misses the lodging business.

SCG, which is involved in many areas of global real estate, announced on Wednesday the creation of two hotel brands: Baccarat Hotels & Resorts and 1 Hotels & Resorts.

The announcement comes as the U.S. hotel industry shares a boom that is also occurring in many world cities. Many analysts expect the expansion will continue for at least a few years as supply attempts to catch up with demand.Continue reading...

There’s one in Denmark, and there’s one in England. And now there will be one in Carlsbad, California: a Legoland Hotel. Don’t worry, the place won’t be built out of Legos – at least not the whole thing.

The hotel – complete with a dragon-guarded entrance -- is slated to open in early April of next year right outside the Legoland theme park and will feature “interactive Lego features, themed play areas, family pool and kid's entertainment,” according to Lego's website. The 250 rooms at California's Legoland Hotel will all have a theme: Pirate, Kingdom, or Adventure.  

Since the hotel is aimed at housing families who are in town to visit the Legoland theme park (and not to those harboring pirate fantasies of one sort or another), each room has two sleeping areas, one with a queen-sized bed and the other with sleeping spaces for up to three kids. After all, it's hard to beat a brand extension you can sleep in.

No wonder Lego is rolling in dough right now.Continue reading...

When 12-year-old Claudia Kincaid and her 9-year-old brother Jamie decide to run away in 1967’s The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, they head off to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they sleep in a big, antique bed and they make money from the coins tourists throw into the fountains. 

If the fictional pair were to hit the road today, they might want to head to the headquarters of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide in Stamford, Connecticut. That is where the company has opened its new two-level Starwood Experience, an open idea lab that might also appeal to another young hotel lover (Eloise). The showcase invites visitors to check out what’s coming next in a few “next generation model guest rooms,” according to a press release. (Certainly this would feel better than the old lumpy antique bed at the Met.) 

The idea is to test out new innovations in two- and three-dimensional design, guest-facing technology, brand programming, event activation in public spaces, and food and beverage initiatives for such Starwood hotel brands as Sheraton, Westin, Le Meridien, Aloft, Element and Four Points by Sheraton.
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One of the most famous landmarks of colonial era Shanghai was a sign that hung in The Bund park reading "No Dogs and Chinese." That sign never existed, although the urban legend persists because such rules did exist. Now, nearly 100 years later, with Chinese consumers growing more powerful every year, a luxury fashion designer has opened old wounds with a statement so colonially racist it would be comfortable on the streets of the French Concession circa 1921.

In a statement to WWD, the founder of high-end fashioner Zadig & Voltaire said that its new boutique hotel slated to open on the Left Bank in Paris in 2014 "won’t be open to Chinese tourists." Outrageous, for sure. But does the sentiment reveal an uncomfortable relationship between the world's haute fashion houses and their nouveau riche Chinese patrons? Just a week after D&G needed to explain its "Moorish" earrings, Thierry Gillier, fashion brand Zadig + Voltaire's founder, told WWD of the brand's new Paris hotel:

“It will be a slightly private hotel, not open to everybody, with 40 rooms. We are going to select guests. It won’t be open to Chinese tourists, for example. There is a lot of demand in Paris — many people are looking for quiet with a certain privacy.”

Through the weekend the story lit up Chinese social media networks including Weibo. Needless to say, reactions were swift and scathing.Continue reading...

The tony Cosmopolitan hotel in Las Vegas made its name with the “Just the right amount of wrong” campaign.

Building on that theme this summer was an on-site installation that invited the public to share their "right amount of wrong" in an exhibition called "Confessions," a public art project designed by New Orleans artist and TED Fellow Candy Chang, whose public installations aim to spark conversation. Visitors were asked to share their secrets anonymously, keeping the brotherhood intact of what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but wooing over 1,500 confessions by exhibit end.

As artist-in-residence at The Cosmopolitan, Chang turned its P3 Studio gallery into a giant confessional, “inspired by Post Secret, Shinto shrine prayer walls, and Catholicism, people could write and submit their confessions on wooden plaques in the privacy of confession booths.” The confessional themes that emerged ran the gamut: “Over half were about sex, love, or fears of dying alone.”Continue reading...