Successful Meetings - March 2009 - (Page 52)

is making its way through the construction pipeline. Rooms don’t come cheap; average daily rates hit $350 in 2008. On March 1, the city’s hotel room occupancy tax is due to increase from 5 percent to 5.875 percent, bringing the total tax on a New York City hotel room to 14.25 percent, not including an additional charge of $3.50 per room, per night for a Javits Center/hotel occupancy fee. Once your group is here, however, there are endless options for activities. Beyond the classic breakouts like shopping, Broadway, and Central Park, there are many undiscovered treats in the Big Apple. Meet at the Apartment opened last year in SoHo Health Makes Wealth With such a high price point, hotels around the city are adding innovative touches to distinguish themselves from the competition. Wyndham Hotels and Resorts debuted last year in the city with two Wyndham Garden properties, a 124room property in Chelsea and a 224-room property in Midtown. The Wyndham Garden Hotel-Midtown Convention Center, with 3,150 sf of meeting space, offers allergy-friendly rooms in partnership with PURE Solutions. The rooms undergo a multi-step cleaning process designed to remove up to 98 percent of allergens using an air purification system, and the mattresses are wrapped in a microbial shield to make them resistant to bacteria and viruses. Environmental initiatives abound as well. Hotel Pennsylvania, the city’s fourth-largest property, with 1,700 rooms and 90,000 sf of event space, has received an Energy Star rating—one of just two hotels in New York City to earn the designation for energy efficiency. Energy Star facilities are among the top 25 percent of facilities in the country for energy performance. The property also completed a $7 million renovation last year, updating rooms with new soft goods and flat-screen televisions as well as upgrades to one of its ballrooms and pre-function space. The Crowne Plaza Times Square recently completed an $85 million renovation, and now offers “golf rooms” complete with mini putting greens, hotel-supplied Odyssey putters, and takehome Callaway golf balls. The 770-room property with 24,551 sf of event space also offers a Butler Floor—16 rooms with complimentary services including private transportation to the hotel, in-room check-in and check-out, packing and unpacking services, laundry pressing, and dry cleaning. New and interesting properties are opening up regularly. Last year saw the debut of the 140-room Thompson LES, the 145-room Cooper Square, and the soft opening of Andre Balazs’ 337-room The Standard NYC. The Standard, which was still finalizing its total planned event space at presstime, straddles the High Line, an abandoned elevated railway that runs 1.5 miles along the west side of the city. New York has allocated $50 million to turn the railway into a park, ending at the Javits Convention Center on 34th Street. The southern section opens this spring. In 2009, 21 properties are slated to open, including the Javits Jitters E 52 veryone who spends a night in a New York City hotel pays $1.50 toward the Javits Convention Center capital fund, but where is that money going? The project to expand the center by 500,000 sf has been started, stopped, restarted, redesigned, and retired so many times that planners may be forgiven for forgetting the city even wanted a bigger center in the first place. A revised plan announced in October 2008 calls for $700 million for renovations to the existing structure, which would add 60,000 sf of exhibit space. If the state fails to expand or renovate the Javits Center, it is likely to face a lawsuit from the hotel industry over the $1.50 hotel tax that was first levied in 2005 for a windfall of $645 million, according to The New York Times. The construction is expected to start in June 2009 and be completed in 2012. I SM I March 2009 I SuccessfulMeetings.com http://www.SuccessfulMeetings.com

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Successful Meetings - March 2009 Contents Editor's Letter News Update Education Management Matters Meetings Law Mouth for Sale Visionaries And the Award Goes to... Taking Green Initiatives to the Top Events of Presidential Proportion It's a Small World After All Places + Spaces Big Island Supplement-Insert NYC Metro Houston Oahu The Bahamas Memphis Passport

Successful Meetings - March 2009

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