Jason Cochran
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On board the Oasis of the Seas: What's it like?
Okay. You know it's big. So let's set aside that superlative, even though it's absolutely true. The Oasis of the Seas is ginormous: the longest, the tallest, the widest.
More of interest is how it measures up as an experience. I'm writing this from the press lounge on Deck 4, which Royal Caribbean has set up for the journalists that it invited to test out its glorious new $1.4 billion mortgage-cum-cruise ship. When you're talking about 17 decks and 2,700 staterooms, you need a lot of time to nose around and even more time to process.
So far, though, this ship is astounding, partly because Royal Caribbean threw some of the old strictures overboard. It's no longer concerned about width restrictions -- the Oasis is too fat to ever go through the Panama Canal -- and once rules like those are jettisoned, new designs can sweep in.
The Oasis of the Seas: designed to keep your dollars captive (and "dumb down" the travel experience)
Royal Caribbean's $1.4 billion new ship, the Oasis of the Seas, is notable not just because of its measurements. They're extraordinarily impressive measurements, to be sure: 20 stories high, 1,180 feet long, 2,700 staterooms, 225,282 tons. But for its guests, the even bigger story is what those measurements do to the traveling experience.Arthur Frommer is one of the last great travel muckrackers in an industry crowded with fawning types, and his latest consumer reporting nugget comes from plain sight: the summer 2010 itineraries of the Oasis. The ship, which will depart from Fort Lauderdale's Port Everglades, will be crowding its trips with at-sea days.
On many week-long trips, he finds, the Oasis will spend as many as three whole days, or half its time away from port, out at sea with no contact with any port or culture. On many itineraries, one of the only days spent on land will be passed on the cruise line's private beach of Labadee, on the coast of Haiti. That makes four out of six days, or two-thirds of the trip, that all 6,300 passengers on a full ship will be Royal Caribbean's captive audience, only spending their dollars with the company.
On many runs, a fifth day will be spent at Costa Maya, a remote beach location that was largely built and maintained exclusively for cruise ship passengers. The only day on those week-long trips spent at an actual, authentic port of call will be the one passed at Cozumel, which Frommer proclaims "the world's dullest port visit."
Gallery: Oasis of the Seas
A special sneak peek at the new Waldorf Astoria
Newly constructed hotels almost never invite the media to check them out a month before the ribbon-cutting. But this is no ordinary year, and this is no ordinary hotel opening. The Waldorf Astoria, a grande dame of American hotels, has chosen this economic climate, of all times, to open its first outpost beyond the borders of Manhattan, and it's doing it at Walt Disney World, of all places."The hotel has taken $70 million in group bookings since June of 2007," said Tom Parke, its Director of Marketing, who said the so-called AIG Effect may end up benefiting the hotel in its opening months. "This whole year, corporations haven't really met. But they've got to meet in the fourth quarter. When are we open? Fourth quarter."
On October 1, 78 years to the day after the opening of its Park Avenue flagship and 38 years to the day after the opening of Disney World's Magic Kingdom, the 497-room Waldorf opens in Orlando. Times are rough for the Florida tourism industry, and the hunger for business may account for how smoothly construction has apparently gone: We're three weeks away, and nearly everything is in place. The AC has been cranking all summer, and the pool has had water in it for three months.
In an effort to make sure everything came in on time and with no funny business, the hotel hired two security firms -- so they could keep an eye on each other. No wonder the management had no shame in inviting Gadling to see their handiwork, through the clutter of ladders and plastic sheeting.
Gallery: Waldorf Astoria Orlando
Exploring forgotten L.A. on a Conservancy walking tour
In the current movie hit (500) Days of Summer, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character Tom brings his quasi-girlfriend Summer (Zooey Deschanel) to a park overlooking downtown Los Angeles, and together they admire the grand old buildings standing above the desultory new parking lots. "There's a lot of beautiful stuff here," says Tom. "I just wish people would notice it more."I almost leapt out of my seat and cheered. Downtown Los Angeles is one of the most incredible, yet most ignored, urban landscapes in America. Built in time of fantastic wealth and artistic productivity, it was more or less abandoned in the late 1940s, and now, an entire city that could compete with Chicago's Loop, Pittsburgh, or countless other lavish leftovers from the Gilded Age, has been mostly left, largely intact but rotting, to Mexican immigrants. For lots of white Americans, it might as well be off the maps.
I'm always hungry to learn more about the original Los Angeles, but few of the people I meet seem to know anything about it. While there are lots of books about fake palazzos and long-lost Hollywood stars, even the manager at The Traveler's Bookcase, the city's most important travel bookshop, was at a loss to provide me with any book of substance about the history of the area.
Thank goodness for the efforts of the Los Angeles Conservancy, a preservation group that fights to preserve what it can of the downtown district. Because there's so much worth saving, the group runs popular walking tours of the best bits, usually on weekends when suburbanites can enjoy them.
Los Angeles' SLS Hotel Reviewed
Los Angeles may be one of America's trendiest cities, but when it comes to luxury hotels, it's in love with the past. Something about New Money tempts its holders into imitating the old ways rather than forging new ones of their own. So Beverly Hills hotels, especially, operate with a sort of muted, discreet luxury more suited to a moneyed uncle than a cutting-edge whippersnapper.
But late last year, nightlife impresario Sam Nazarian, the guy behind some of L.A. coolest and best-designed haunts, decided to enter the hotel market and hip up the luxury niche. Could he make his new venture, the SLS, appropriately sassy without losing the formality and class of a proper five-star hotel appropriate to the City of Angels?
The location is certainly ideal: In the former Hotel Meridien on La Cienega, a couple of blocks south of 3rd Street and the Beverly Center. You could walk between the two -- if anyone in Los Angeles ever actually walked anywhere. The clubs of West Hollywood are about five minutes east, and on a good day, LAX is 20 minutes down La Cienega.
Sometimes the best way to evaluate places like this is to simply take the big names out of it and appraise the place as a product. That's what I did. Without the splashy names to impress you, will you still be impressed?
But late last year, nightlife impresario Sam Nazarian, the guy behind some of L.A. coolest and best-designed haunts, decided to enter the hotel market and hip up the luxury niche. Could he make his new venture, the SLS, appropriately sassy without losing the formality and class of a proper five-star hotel appropriate to the City of Angels?
The location is certainly ideal: In the former Hotel Meridien on La Cienega, a couple of blocks south of 3rd Street and the Beverly Center. You could walk between the two -- if anyone in Los Angeles ever actually walked anywhere. The clubs of West Hollywood are about five minutes east, and on a good day, LAX is 20 minutes down La Cienega.
Sometimes the best way to evaluate places like this is to simply take the big names out of it and appraise the place as a product. That's what I did. Without the splashy names to impress you, will you still be impressed?
