Travel+Leisure’s Top 500 Hotels in the World Provides Valuable Tips for Luxury Vacation Rental Owners
Dec.16, 2006. We look forward every year to the January edition of Travel+Leisure, which contains the T+L 500, the guide to the world’s best hotels. This year’s edition is the best ever, because it contains both the rates compared with other properties on the list and what distinguishes each hotel from the competition.
The list now contains more properties from Asia. The United States and Canada represented 55 percent of the list in 2003, but now account for 43 percent. Of the 213 hotels on the list from the United States and Canada this year, 91 properties---43 percent of the region—have appeared on the T+L 500 for five years in a row
Having stayed in some of these hotels, I am not surprised. The top hotels always seem to have a dedication of service that sets them apart from the competition. Also, I am not surprised that Ritz-Carlton has the most properties on this list of any hotel chain. Readers of the June 2006 edition of our Vacation Rentals Newsletter understand the management philosophy of Marriott, which owns the Ritz-Carlton brand. It does a superb job of staying on the top of all of the hotel categories in which it competes. This is why the Marriott tops the world in terms of hotel revenue.
While owners of luxury vacation rentals cannot expect to match the level of service that the top 500 hotels in the world provide, they can always pick up some good ideas from staying at such hotels, if nothing more than the attitude they exhibit to their guests. However, it may be wise to try out hotels in less expensive cities than New York City, where the average room rate for hotels that made the list is $740 per night.
