The Plaza Hotel first made a debut on October 1st 1907. And now, on March 1st 2008, the century old Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue, NYC, makes a grand re-debut after a 2 year, $400 million lobby to roof renovation. The Plaza hotel will offer 282 distinctive guestrooms, including 152 pied-à-terres. Amenities will include a world-class retail collection debuting in late spring 2008, featuring exclusive boutiques and purveyors of fine food, as well as health and wellness facilities to include a Caudalie Spa, Fitness Center by Radu, and Warren Tricomi Salon.

Kitty Bean Yancey, USA Today, has a full report on the good old new Plaza. The century-old Plaza, once run by Ivana Trump and now managed by Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, is much more than a hotel. It’s the setting for Neil Simon’s play Plaza Suite. It’s where The Beatles stayed on their 1964 U.S. tour. It’s the site of A-list soirees and celebrity wedding receptions. And it’s a National Historic Landmark too. Rates for hotel rooms start at $775 a night, nearly $900 with taxes.

Showing a room, Krige demonstrates how guests get in by whisking a keycard past a panel on the door. Inside, everything from temperature to lights can be controlled by touching a screen on the wall that also can call the butler, display headlines and weather or be slipped from its holder to serve as a remote control for the TV.

 Common amneties - Beaux Arts inspired décor, complimentary wireless high speed internet, IP-based VOD, wall mounted flat screen television, mosaic bathroom with glass shower and bathtub, safe, hairdryer, refrigirator, private bar.

Dining - The historied and restored Palm Court, with its stained glass lay light, continues the tradition of offering afternoon tea, along with breakfast, lunch and dinner for guests, as well as being a popular meeting place for the rich and the famous on the Eastern seaboard. 

The Plaza Champagne Bar offers freshly baked pastries and specialty coffees by day and an extensive  list of  fine champagne to to enjoy after the sun goes down.

The Rose Club, set to open in late March, will offer a a selection of delectable cocktail appetizers and also a lighter epicurean menu to satisfy the tastes of those wishing to indulge in a lighter gourmet fare.

The Oak Room and the Oak bar have been restored to their full grandeur, and will offer the same experience which gave it the moniker of being New York’s ‘Men’s Bar’, with a clubby rich boy atmosphere, leather bound chairs and cityscape murals on the oak paneling.

Information: Fifth Avenue at Central Park South, NYC, New York 10119; (212) 759-3000; email - theplaza@fairmont.com; Web: www.fairmont.com/theplaza  

A funny thought stuck me as I stood in the box like lobby of the London NYC hotel located at 151 West 54th Street, New York, N.Y.; (866) 690-2029, between Times Square and Central Park. The funny thought crossing my mind was that if this was how you bring a taste of London to NYC, what would a hotelier in London do, to bring a taste of New York there? I look forward to your comments about what would make a New Yorker feel at home in a London hotel….Anyway, back to the London NYC.

Granted, it’s a pretty big box of a lobby, and very stylish, but a box it is. It was exactly the kind of hotel where you would imagine stuffed British nobility with lotsa chips on their shoulders would feel right at home - Tons of class, understated luxury, no psychedelic colors, staff speaking in hushed tones, very conservative decor and nothing close to the bedlam that usually exists in an NYC hotel. We’ll get to the suites (no rooms here) shortly.

Even the location speaks volumes. The Big Apple lives by the minute, and a minute away from the center of everything is a minute lost. NYC hotels just aren’t hip if there’s no view of Times Square. Not so for the British experience, it seems, where a view of Central Park is considered more appropriate. The London NYC is the middle of nowhere, but just a stone’s throw from every important place in New York - Times Square, Central Park, the Avenue of the Americas, Fifth Avenue shopping…. It’s like the planners of the hotel, which until 2006 was named the Rihga hotel, took out a map of NYC and stuck a pin on a place which they deemed to be perfect with a birdseye view of the city, and then proceeded to buy an existing hotel at said location and give it an English makeover.

As for the rooms…sorry - the suites, it was upscale ($300 plus taxes), and the decor reflecting the overall prim and propah tone of the hotel. Very spacey - 1800 sq feet awash in luxurious furnishings, big French windows leading to the bedroom, flat screen televisions in both rooms, and solid furniture, as you would find in a plush manor. Just not the tacky kind of put together stuff you find in hotels.

This was the real deal - A massive sofa which could easily hold upto a dozen people, a huge work desk with a nice deep chair (again not the kind you find in hotels). And it had just about anything you might need - personal bar, refrigirator, complimentary wireless internet, iPod docking stations.

The restaurant and dining facilities at the London NYC are in the capable hands of renowned chef Gordon Ramsay, and modelled after his own restaurant in the UK. The food’s a tad bit too costly to really enjoy the taste, so it would be advisable to limit your in-room or in-hotel dining to a cup of tea or coffee.

I’ll say this for the London NYC. Like it or not, they do things in style, and if you’re the kind of person who wants quiet luxury, and you have a limo to whisk you to your destination, no better place to stay in than the London NYC hotel. 

Chuck Squatriglia, Wired News, has an update on New York’s search for a clean, green, iconic ‘taxi of tomorrow’. The yellow taxicab is the quintessential New York City vehicle, but as icons go, it sucks. The Crown victoria is as uninspired as it is ubiquitous. You’d think the nation’s largest market for taxis - New York has 13,150 cabs carrying 240 billion million people a year…

He also adds that every taxi in new York must be a hybrid by 2012. And he ends with a question. When it comes to to cabs, as goes New York, so goes the nation. So - what’s what does the taxi of tomorrow look like to you?

Read the full article here. Well, if you ask me, the taxi of today is neither clean nor green nor iconic. If anything, it’s mean. And I prefer blue to the dirty yellow. But the article misses the main grouse about a taxi ride in NYC. It’s the cabbies, and not the cab. Ok, so green is good. But who gives a rat’s ass if the cab is yellow or blue. Who cares if it has smooth curves and a great bod. After all, you just want to get from A to B, alive and in one piece. 

Besides, it’s far more important to be able to listen or talk to a cabbie without feeling the urge to rip off the meter and wrap it around it around his neck, than it is to feel good about the color and shape or model of the cab. NYC transit authorities would be better advised to focus on tomorrow’s drivers rather than tomorrow’s taxi.

In other news, the AP reports that corporate travel budgets are shrinking. Corporate travel managers are taking a more active role in keeping on-the-road spending in check:

_ Employees are increasingly being asked to provide an economic rationale for their trips.

_ Rules that require employees to book the lowest fare, stay in pre-approved hotels or double-up in cars and rooms are being enforced more strictly.

_ Executives are pushing alternatives to face-to-face meetings, including phone- and Web-conferencing.

Ack! Economic rationale? Lowest fare? Pre-approved hotels? This is ghastly. Luckily, my editor is a bit too busy too read AP news stories, and hopefully will never see this story about travel managers cutting budgets, and will continue signing off on my luxurious getaways around New York in a state of blissful ignorance.

New York - Associated Press - The first big storm of the season burdened the metropolitan area with up to 9 inches of snow Friday, forcing airlines to cancel more than 1,100 flights and making travel miserable on highways and sidewalks. Earlier in the day, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that his army of 2,000 snowfighters was expecting as much as 10 inches by Saturday morning _ and that it would cost $1 million an inch to clear away.

More than 1,100 flights were canceled at the region’s three airports, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey spokesman Steve Coleman said. Flights were delayed up to three hours at LaGuardia Airport and up to 2{ hours at John F. Kennedy International Airport and Newark Liberty International Airport, he said. Times Square was a mess of gray slush by afternoon.

Freezing rain, sleet, snow, power outages, accidents, cancelled flights…This is the kind of weather when a simple walk down the street turns into winter adventure sports. It’s that time of the year when you have a sore throat and your bones are creaking. It’s hell outside and all you wanna do is burrow in under a blanket on the couch, with a cup of hot chocolate.

Fox News - A tractor trailer carrying live chickens overturned on a Brooklyn expressway, spilling crates and releasing the squawking birds onto the road. The tractor trailer overturned at Flushing Avenue on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway about 2:30 a.m. Thursday, spilling its feathered cargo, police said. The roadway was closed for several hours as crews cleaned up the accident.

And eat the chickens…

In other news, The Times, UK, reports that New York’s artists, in addition to be being grossly overrated, are also considered to be trend setters for property purchase.

One unchanging trend in the New York property market is the search among aspiring novelists and songwriters for a neighbourhood where they can afford to live. This quest is closely tracked by affluent investors who know that the latest artists’ quarter sooner or later becomes a sought-after address. SoHo and NoHo lofts in which Wall Streeters now live on seven-figure salaries were once the squalid homes of penniless painters. Williamsburg in Brooklyn is another now-gentrified former creative hangout. As a result, the writers have packed up their laptops and gone farther afield, up the Hudson River to the towns of Peekskill, Haverstraw and Beacon, an hour by train from midtown Manhattan. Will the rich speculators follow?

I dunno if the rich speculators will follow, but rich lenders to whom some of the aforementioned artists owe a lot of money will certainly follow…

In more bad news for down on the luck NYC commuters, new fares for trains to or from New York City stations go into effect March 1, Metro-North Railroad has announced. Single or round trip tickets are slated to go up by about 7.7%, while monthly and weekly tickets will see an increase in between 3.76% and 4.25%.

Question time - If you can think of one point, or time period, in your life which is best suited for traveling, which would it be? Immediately after retirement.

According to this Fox Business report, retirees account for a large portion of the travel population, with an estimated 23 million retired people intending to travel over a 12-month span, according to 2006 statistics from research firm Focalyst. Those retirees were expected to spend a combined $34 billion on their next trip — larger than the amount families said they planned to spend.

And the same retirees prefer to opt for cruise vacations by a huge margin. The reasons why retirees prefer cruise liners are not so hard to find. No extensive or exaustive drives, flights, multiple hotel stays, going from one place to another on foot and by car, etc. In short, nothing but pure relaxation on a cruise. Everything is already planned, and you don’t have to scratch your head worrying about connecting flights or the hotel that lost your reservation.

And it’s not just about ravaging the world with conspicuous consumerism and luxury. The report also goes on to add that about 57% of Travelocity members 65 and older say they plan to volunteer overseas in 2008, compared to just 48% of average respondents. These vacations can be centered on everything from building houses in New Orleans to working at a soup kitchen in

I always knew my Dad was more hip than he let on….