I don’t know if this is a coincidence or not, but nonetheless it is very ironic..

Late last night I posted the article “1 Hotel Fort Lauderdale” where I speculated that the 1 Hotel in Fort Lauderdale would be a re-branding of the Sheraton Yankee Clipper hotel. As I stated in the post and I’ll reiterate now, I have nothing to back that claim up except my own conclusions. I normally shy away from items like this – but this looked like too much of an actual possibility to pass up.

When I posted the article last night I checked out the 1 Hotel’s website, and as has been there since the 1 Hotel site was initially launched last year, the Fort Lauderdale location was listed as “Coming Soon”. Today, I checked back on the website – the Fort Lauderdale location has been removed from the main page! (http://www.1hotels.com/home.html), but if you click on any of the links for the other hotel locations, you will see the Fort Lauderdale link re-appear.

This could just be a totally ironic event, but it’s interesting because the contents of the 1Hotel’s website has not changed one bit (at least that I can tell) since it was initially launched in mid-2007 – until today, one day after I wrote about where I think it may be located. In fact, since the site was originally launched, the link that is provided for the 1 Hotel Seattle leads to an invalid page – to this day it still has not been corrected to go to the www.1residences.com website – the fact the removed Fort Lauderdale from the main page one day after I wrote about it, and have yet to correct the link to their one active project is odd.

Is Starwood Capital trying to keep the location a secret until its finalized? Has the 1 Hotel Fort Lauderdale been canceled? We’ll see how things pan out.

andrew@alconic-inc.com