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Could hotel space be so tight in London that business travelers are checking into St. George's Hospital? Not exactly. The 160-year-old neoclassical St. George's, now controlled by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, has been converted into a luxury hotel called the Lanesborough. Its medicine for weary travelers: canopy beds, full butler service and morning newspapers handpressed by the staff.
In New York, London and Hongkong, a dozen new or totally renovated deluxe hotels now grace the scene. The roster ranges from a Victorian comeback in London, the Regent; to New York's first new grand hotel in a half century, the Four Seasons; to a Hongkong dowager, the Peninsula, with spanking-new helipads on the roof.
Both new and like-new hotels seek to combine traditional service with space-age technology. They now provide extra suites as well as private dining rooms. Manhattan's Four Seasons offers 12 such private rooms for working lunches because, says general manager Thomas Gurtner, hosts of such affairs like to call the shots. Yet the hotels have also tried to preserve the best of the old, be it butler service or a rooftop ballroom (as at New York's St. Regis).
Sometimes a renovation may have been necessary just for a hotel to keep up basic functions, much less appearances. When loyal guests returned to the Sultan of Brunei's fabled old Dorchester in London after its $118 million, two-year restoration only to be greeted by the same beloved 1930s lobby, they asked general manager Riccardo Obertelli, "What did you spend all that money on?" Apparently, they'd forgotten the droning window air conditioners, the antiquated dumbwaiters and the quirky plumbing.
But do London, New York and Hongkong really need a brace of remodeled or new grand hotels? Hospitality industry accounting firm Pannell Kerr Forster estimates that of London's 25,000 to 30,000 better hotel rooms, only 5,500 are deluxe. New York, with just 3,200 deluxe rooms, has been "able to absorb [its latest crop]," says John Fox, a director at PKF. Although Hongkong has 24,560 four-and five-star rooms, the number of guests demanding all levels of accommodations shot up 15.8 percent in 1992. Besides, hotels are being torn down in the colony to make way for more lucrative commercial development. (The talk of the town is whether...