As all frequent readers of this blog have found out by now – I’m a huge fan of two companies, Starwood Hotels & Starwood Capital (and no, its not a coincidence – both were started by Barry Sternlicht), so with that, I frequently check the websites of the companies and their future hotel brands a few times a week to see if anything has changed.

Today I noticed that element’s website had two minor changes -

1. A list of future opening dates of elements throughout the world (Right now, just Canada and United States)
2. A marketing video for element. Unfortunately it does not show anything about the element brand (you would think they would show people using element’s “mock-up” hotel located in a warehouse in White Plains, NY) – its merely a voice overlay, stock video and a nice background song (Stay by Sarah Bettens if your interested), but still – its something.

Currently the list includes 15 locations opening between July 2008 until January 2011 – talk about planning ahead! But according to Starwood Hotel’s development website there are another 20 (or 17, considering they list only 12 deals as being “confirmed”) deals in the pipeline.

Since Starwood Hotels website is purely template driven – for example – go to a hotel’s website – take the W Times Square for example – https://www.starwoodhotels.com/whotels/property/overview/index.html?propertyID=1234, replace the “whotels” with one of starwoods other brands – “sheraton”, “lemeridian”, “westin” or “stregis” and voila! look and feel of that hotel brand – with the W Times Square pictures, information and data.. Its a smart move on Starwood’s part because it makes altering the brand’s look and feel easy, and the same goes for changing data/pictures, etc for the individual hotels..

Anyway – I’m totally getting off my point..

I decided to see if that template works for aloft opening dates.. so i changed https://www.starwoodhotels.com/element/newhotels/index.html to https://www.starwoodhotels.com/alofthotels/newhotels/index.html – and there appeared the list of opening dates for alofts throughout the world!

According to that list, as of now there are 57 alofts scheduled to open between Jan 2008 (Glendale, AZ) and Jul 2010.

In the last issue of Hotel & Motel Management (yes, I subscribe to it) was a great article on aloft & element, describing how Starwood has been using a warehouse in Hawthorne, NY as a staging area for both the aloft and element brands, where design concepts were built and demonstrated to potential developers, architects, designers and of course, future clients (How do I get an invite?? I’d love to go! My email is at the bottom Starwood!!).

A quote from Paul Sacco, Senior VP of Development of Limited Service for Starwood stood out as VERY intriguing:

A large number of deals include complexes that have both an aloft and an Element, or a Westin and an element, or other combinations

[however] much more than 50 percent of the deals are stand-alone

That might explain why there is so much discrepancy in the W Hotel/Aloft Harlem – its possible that it might be a combination hotel, especially since its in an urban location where combination hotels are very useful.

Now, besides the Lexington aloft/element, (which will be in separate buildings, on the same property) and the Irving, TX location, I do not know for sure of any other multi-brand aloft/element – but looking over the list from the coming soon pages, the following cities are scheduled to receive both an aloft and an element: Toronto, Orlando, Leawood, Kansas, Arundel Mills & Baltimore International Airport, Maryland, Grapevine, TX, Dulles North, MD.

It’s a very good chance that out of the 15 confirmed elements – 9 are combination aloft/element properties.. Very interesting.

There is no doubt that those two brands are very complimentary – both are designed with a contemporary look and feel and the daily room rate is supposed to be very close ($120 p/night for aloft, $150 p/night for element) compared to… say.. the difference between Four Points & St Regis. And best yet (listen up here Hilton) aloft and element are not direct competitors to each other – one is an extended stay, and one is more for 1 or 2 night stays. I wonder if Starwood is promoting the brands as a package deal, or if developers are just so excited about it they are building both.

andrew@alconic-inc.com