Celebrity Life

France’s Cote de Granit Rose or Pink Granit Coast is offering the ultimate immersive, off-grid luxury experience. And the perfect social distancing and self-isolating holiday. Karl Stromberg wanted to destroy the world. Jean-Michel Ducancelle wants to help protect it. Inspired by the James Bond film, “The Spy Who Loved Me”, the French naval architect has […]

The post Anthénea, World’s First Floating Hotel Suite and Undersea Observatory appeared first on Upscale Living Magazine.

France’s Cote de Granit Rose or Pink Granit Coast is offering the ultimate immersive, off-grid luxury experience. And the perfect social distancing and self-isolating holiday. Karl Stromberg wanted to destroy the world. Jean-Michel Ducancelle wants to help protect it. Inspired by the James Bond film, “The Spy Who Loved Me”, the French naval architect has […]

The post Anthénea, World’s First Floating Hotel Suite and Undersea Observatory appeared first on Upscale Living Magazine.

There are only two things on the agenda this 2021: getting vaccinated and planning a trip somewhere far far away.

The post Five Hotel Escapes Worth Looking Forward To in a Post-Covid-Vaccine World appeared first on LUXUO.

The Oil Nut Bay beachfront villa can house up to 12 guests at a time, promising optimal seclusion, connectivity, and convenience.

The post The Oil Nut Bay Beachfront Villa is a Multi-Generational Island Escape appeared first on LUXUO.

This December, the Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong has launched a series of attractive and noteworthy staycation and dining packages for those looking for a mini getaway. Whether you're alone, coupled or with your family, a Four Seasons Christmas staycation is what you need to entertain and treat yourself.

Starting Christmas Eve, local residents can stay for a minimum of two nights at Four Seasons Hotel, allowing ample time to indulge in award-winning gastronomies, their infinity pool and relaxing massages at the spa. This festive staycation includes a daily breakfast for two with 30 percent savings on the best available rate when staying for two nights or more. Another even more attractive packages the Suite Escape package which enables guests to enjoy 50 percent savings off the best available rate. Guests can also gain exclusive access to Lane Crawford’s Platinum Suite with a complimentary personal styling session to find their perfect festive ensemble.

[caption id="attachment_212858" align="aligncenter" width="801"] Four Seasons Harbour View Room[/caption]

For a magical Christmas to remember in Hong Kong, book the Presidential Suite on December 24, 25 or 31 and enjoy exclusive seasonal specials including a round trip limousine transfer, an 8-course festive dinner at the three-Michelin star Caprice, one 90 minute Jade Stone treatment for two persons, Executive Club access and benefits, a full hour personal styling service in the comfort of the suite by Lane Crawford, and a private jewellery tour at Chopard.

[caption id="attachment_212859" align="aligncenter" width="889"] The Presidential Suite Dining Room[/caption]

Meanwhile, families who book any of the room packages over festive season will enjoy complimentary kids’ activities including nail art and cookie decorating classes.

To add to the year-end cheer from December 23, 2020 to January 2, 2021, the festive dinner buffet is exclusively available for room guests featuring a bountiful array of holiday favourites, such as the Traditional Slow Roasted Butterball Turkey, Oven Roasted Beef Rib Eye, Gammon Ham and Pastry Chef Ringo Chan's Panettone.

[caption id="attachment_212856" align="aligncenter" width="753"] Four Season's Caprice Bar[/caption]

And if the above isn't already enticing enough, you can ring in 2021 in style with a decadent Caviar and Champagne celebration at Caprice Bar while enjoying  music from DJ Helen Ting. The bar boasts magnificent views of the Victoria Harbour and Hong Kong skyline, making it a perfect venue for a count down.

Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong, 8 Finance Street, Central, +852 3196 8888

The post Here’s Why You Need to Experience the Four Seasons’ Christmas Staycations appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.

This December, the Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong has launched a series of attractive and noteworthy staycation and dining packages for those looking for a mini getaway. Whether you're alone, coupled or with your family, a Four Seasons Christmas staycation is what you need to entertain and treat yourself.

Starting Christmas Eve, local residents can stay for a minimum of two nights at Four Seasons Hotel, allowing ample time to indulge in award-winning gastronomies, their infinity pool and relaxing massages at the spa. This festive staycation includes a daily breakfast for two with 30 percent savings on the best available rate when staying for two nights or more. Another even more attractive packages the Suite Escape package which enables guests to enjoy 50 percent savings off the best available rate. Guests can also gain exclusive access to Lane Crawford’s Platinum Suite with a complimentary personal styling session to find their perfect festive ensemble.

[caption id="attachment_212858" align="aligncenter" width="801"] Four Seasons Harbour View Room[/caption]

For a magical Christmas to remember in Hong Kong, book the Presidential Suite on December 24, 25 or 31 and enjoy exclusive seasonal specials including a round trip limousine transfer, an 8-course festive dinner at the three-Michelin star Caprice, one 90 minute Jade Stone treatment for two persons, Executive Club access and benefits, a full hour personal styling service in the comfort of the suite by Lane Crawford, and a private jewellery tour at Chopard.

[caption id="attachment_212859" align="aligncenter" width="889"] The Presidential Suite Dining Room[/caption]

Meanwhile, families who book any of the room packages over festive season will enjoy complimentary kids’ activities including nail art and cookie decorating classes.

To add to the year-end cheer from December 23, 2020 to January 2, 2021, the festive dinner buffet is exclusively available for room guests featuring a bountiful array of holiday favourites, such as the Traditional Slow Roasted Butterball Turkey, Oven Roasted Beef Rib Eye, Gammon Ham and Pastry Chef Ringo Chan's Panettone.

[caption id="attachment_212856" align="aligncenter" width="753"] Four Season's Caprice Bar[/caption]

And if the above isn't already enticing enough, you can ring in 2021 in style with a decadent Caviar and Champagne celebration at Caprice Bar while enjoying  music from DJ Helen Ting. The bar boasts magnificent views of the Victoria Harbour and Hong Kong skyline, making it a perfect venue for a count down.

Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong, 8 Finance Street, Central, +852 3196 8888

The post Here’s Why You Need to Experience the Four Seasons’ Christmas Staycations appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.

Known for its exclusive and lavish resort experience, Aman Resorts is the go-to hotel chain frequent by the likes of Bill Gates and the Kardashians.

The post Aman Resorts To Open Its Third Luxury Hotel In New York appeared first on LUXUO.

Seated in a corner suite in The Hari, his soon-to-be-completed hotel on that indistinct border where Wanchai and Causeway Bay wash into each other, Aron Harilela looks relaxed and very much at home. The hotel’s soft opening is planned for just a few weeks away, and every one of the floors beneath us is a cacophony of rattling and whining hammer drills, clumping work boots and the clatter of planks and scaffolding. Cables dangle from ceilings and the air is a soup of concrete dust and wood shavings, but if Harilela is concerned about the progress of the first hotel bearing his eminent family’s name – or, to be more accurate, a shortened version of it – to open in his home city, he certainly doesn’t show it.

Virtually a Hong Kong dynasty, the Harilela family has been in the hospitality business for half a century, so why did it take so long for them to go the whole hog and manage their properties themselves? “For years we had one business model,” explains Harilela, “which was to either build or buy hotels, and then give them to third- party management – Holiday Inn, InterContinental, Hilton, W, etcetera. But after 45 years of doing this, the world has changed and the landscape is very different from what it was even 20 years ago. I thought that the hotel market was ripe for something different, with little niches here and there where you could place your hotel.

“So I said let’s do our own hotel, and in about 2010 we started to renovate our London property. At that point I wanted to run the hotel ourselves, but some people in the office said, ‘Listen, what are you doing? We don’t run hotels, we asset manage.’ Weirdly enough, though, my father was very much in favour of running it ourselves. To cut a long story short, we didn’t, but four years later I said, ‘Right, sorry guys, we’ve had enough, we’re going to do it ourselves.’”

The Hari Hong Kong Opens Its Doors on December 12.

After consulting with a branding company on possible names – Harilela says they considered brands based on locations, feelings and personal or family names – they eventually plumped for The Hari, a “mixture between our truncated family name and my father’s name, which resonated with us”. Also, he says, “It’s a name that can travel, it has some gravitas, you can have it in London, you can have it in Bangkok and you can have it in Hong Kong and I don’t think it’s out of place anywhere. It would have been silly to call it The Chesham – our London property’s in Chesham Place, but what does that mean anywhere else?”

Fashioned out of an existing hotel and with just 85 rooms, the London Hari is considerably smaller than its newer sibling in Hong Kong, though there are definite similarities, not least in the fact the famed designer Tara Bernerd was responsible for the interiors of both.

“When we started on the London hotel,” says Harilela, “a hotelier friend, Jason Pomerantz, said, ‘You’ve got to get Tara to do this,’ even though she’d only ever done residential properties before. I said to him, ‘She’s never done hotels, are you crazy?’ But Tara and I got on really well and we created something in London that I think really hit the mark. It’s luxurious but it’s not crazy luxurious and you really feel relaxed – you feel as if you want to come back, regularly.

“I wanted to keep that DNA, so I told Tara that she had to do all The Haris – I don’t want them to look exactly the same but there’s a masculinity to it. It’s not refined luxury and it’s certainly not very feminine.”

Ever a dapper dresser, Harilela today is clad in a bespoke suit in an especially flamboyant blue-and-grey Prince of Wales check, so it seems obvious that the hotel’s look and ambience would also reflect his personal style. “For the first project in London,” he says, “I’d literally walk into Tara’s office and say, ‘I love that tweed jacket, and those grey flannel trousers. That’s what I want to do with the hotel.’ Not only the decor and the clothing, but also in the style of the service. I’m not very poncey and formal, I’m just not. I don’t want to arrive at a restaurant and everyone’s saying, ‘Sir,’ twenty-five times – I mean, just shut up, I’m eating my food. And I’d rather chat with the staff. Maybe it isn’t casual, but it’s certainly not formal, which isn’t the easiest thing to do in Hong Kong, because people are used to that hierarchy.

“If you give me two exact-same hotels, exact-same rooms, exact-same room rates and you go downstairs and one has a buzzing bar and the other one, you go in and the guy says, ‘Er, would you like a cup of tea?’ I’d go to the one with the buzzing bar. When you see what our Japanese restaurant looks like – it’s not designed like a traditional Japanese restaurant. It’s not all bamboo and dark, we’re going to have pumping music and it’s got nothing to do with Japan or Japanese restaurants except the food. We’ve just got a chef from Matsuhisa in Aspen, and I’m so excited about it.”

Harilela isn’t the least bit fazed by the discrepancies in location between the London and Hong Kong hotels. “It doesn’t matter that the Haris in London and Hong Kong are in very different areas,” he says. “Actually, Belgravia [in London] isn’t the best place to put a hotel, because it’s very residential, it’s not that close to the City and the Tube station isn’t that close either, but we really spruced that place up and we’ve done well with it. It’s very London, though, and this is very Hong Kong.

“A few years ago, when we did the W in Sydney, I’d never been there before. It was in Woolloomooloo – and a friend of mine said: ‘Do. Not. Touch. Woolloomooloo. Just don’t touch it, it’s terrible. It’s full of gangs and crime…’ But going to Sydney with new eyes, the one thing I realised was that you go west and you go east and everything is developed, but also that people also love places that are on the water. The hotel is on the water and it’s just a 10-minute walk through the most beautiful botanical gardens to the CBD. This was a pocket that was so overlooked and underdeveloped, and I think it’s the same for where we are in Wanchai.”

There's a masculinity to it — it's certainly not very feminine

Aron Harilela

As for London’s 85 rooms compared to Hong Kong’s 210, Harilela admits that “this is going to be a massive test for us. We can do it in London, but this is a bigger product, it’s our home base and it involves much more investment, because we bought the land, bought the buildings, tore them down and built this from scratch. So we have to get this right. And if we do, then our expansion plans – well, we’ll have to think it out. Can we go bigger, 320 rooms? Because that’s the next bracket where the economies of scale really make sense.”

And then, of course, there’s Covid-19 looming above everything – and, not least, the hospitality industry. “Well,” says Harilela, “you can’t open at 90 percent occupancy anyway. You start with 30 percent and then you nudge it up and you nudge it up again. So there’s only going up from here. We can’t go back down – all economies would be on their knees, so we’ll have no option but to open up the borders at some point. People are social animals. Will we be social distancing on planes? Yeah, for a little while, but once this is over I think that everything will go back to normal. I think we’ll go back to what we know best.

“All those years ago when my father built the Holiday Inn Golden Mile, it was at the end of the ’60s, the riots in Hong Kong had just happened and a lot of his external shareholders said, ‘I’m out.’ This is the first hotel I’ve ever built, and then Covid comes along and I said, ‘Come on, this can’t happen again!’”

The post Something About Hari: Aron Harilela Goes Solo appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.

Seated in a corner suite in The Hari, his soon-to-be-completed hotel on that indistinct border where Wanchai and Causeway Bay wash into each other, Aron Harilela looks relaxed and very much at home. The hotel’s soft opening is planned for just a few weeks away, and every one of the floors beneath us is a cacophony of rattling and whining hammer drills, clumping work boots and the clatter of planks and scaffolding. Cables dangle from ceilings and the air is a soup of concrete dust and wood shavings, but if Harilela is concerned about the progress of the first hotel bearing his eminent family’s name – or, to be more accurate, a shortened version of it – to open in his home city, he certainly doesn’t show it.

Virtually a Hong Kong dynasty, the Harilela family has been in the hospitality business for half a century, so why did it take so long for them to go the whole hog and manage their properties themselves? “For years we had one business model,” explains Harilela, “which was to either build or buy hotels, and then give them to third- party management – Holiday Inn, InterContinental, Hilton, W, etcetera. But after 45 years of doing this, the world has changed and the landscape is very different from what it was even 20 years ago. I thought that the hotel market was ripe for something different, with little niches here and there where you could place your hotel.

“So I said let’s do our own hotel, and in about 2010 we started to renovate our London property. At that point I wanted to run the hotel ourselves, but some people in the office said, ‘Listen, what are you doing? We don’t run hotels, we asset manage.’ Weirdly enough, though, my father was very much in favour of running it ourselves. To cut a long story short, we didn’t, but four years later I said, ‘Right, sorry guys, we’ve had enough, we’re going to do it ourselves.’”

The Hari Hong Kong Opens Its Doors on December 12.

After consulting with a branding company on possible names – Harilela says they considered brands based on locations, feelings and personal or family names – they eventually plumped for The Hari, a “mixture between our truncated family name and my father’s name, which resonated with us”. Also, he says, “It’s a name that can travel, it has some gravitas, you can have it in London, you can have it in Bangkok and you can have it in Hong Kong and I don’t think it’s out of place anywhere. It would have been silly to call it The Chesham – our London property’s in Chesham Place, but what does that mean anywhere else?”

Fashioned out of an existing hotel and with just 85 rooms, the London Hari is considerably smaller than its newer sibling in Hong Kong, though there are definite similarities, not least in the fact the famed designer Tara Bernerd was responsible for the interiors of both.

“When we started on the London hotel,” says Harilela, “a hotelier friend, Jason Pomerantz, said, ‘You’ve got to get Tara to do this,’ even though she’d only ever done residential properties before. I said to him, ‘She’s never done hotels, are you crazy?’ But Tara and I got on really well and we created something in London that I think really hit the mark. It’s luxurious but it’s not crazy luxurious and you really feel relaxed – you feel as if you want to come back, regularly.

“I wanted to keep that DNA, so I told Tara that she had to do all The Haris – I don’t want them to look exactly the same but there’s a masculinity to it. It’s not refined luxury and it’s certainly not very feminine.”

Ever a dapper dresser, Harilela today is clad in a bespoke suit in an especially flamboyant blue-and-grey Prince of Wales check, so it seems obvious that the hotel’s look and ambience would also reflect his personal style. “For the first project in London,” he says, “I’d literally walk into Tara’s office and say, ‘I love that tweed jacket, and those grey flannel trousers. That’s what I want to do with the hotel.’ Not only the decor and the clothing, but also in the style of the service. I’m not very poncey and formal, I’m just not. I don’t want to arrive at a restaurant and everyone’s saying, ‘Sir,’ twenty-five times – I mean, just shut up, I’m eating my food. And I’d rather chat with the staff. Maybe it isn’t casual, but it’s certainly not formal, which isn’t the easiest thing to do in Hong Kong, because people are used to that hierarchy.

“If you give me two exact-same hotels, exact-same rooms, exact-same room rates and you go downstairs and one has a buzzing bar and the other one, you go in and the guy says, ‘Er, would you like a cup of tea?’ I’d go to the one with the buzzing bar. When you see what our Japanese restaurant looks like – it’s not designed like a traditional Japanese restaurant. It’s not all bamboo and dark, we’re going to have pumping music and it’s got nothing to do with Japan or Japanese restaurants except the food. We’ve just got a chef from Matsuhisa in Aspen, and I’m so excited about it.”

Harilela isn’t the least bit fazed by the discrepancies in location between the London and Hong Kong hotels. “It doesn’t matter that the Haris in London and Hong Kong are in very different areas,” he says. “Actually, Belgravia [in London] isn’t the best place to put a hotel, because it’s very residential, it’s not that close to the City and the Tube station isn’t that close either, but we really spruced that place up and we’ve done well with it. It’s very London, though, and this is very Hong Kong.

“A few years ago, when we did the W in Sydney, I’d never been there before. It was in Woolloomooloo – and a friend of mine said: ‘Do. Not. Touch. Woolloomooloo. Just don’t touch it, it’s terrible. It’s full of gangs and crime…’ But going to Sydney with new eyes, the one thing I realised was that you go west and you go east and everything is developed, but also that people also love places that are on the water. The hotel is on the water and it’s just a 10-minute walk through the most beautiful botanical gardens to the CBD. This was a pocket that was so overlooked and underdeveloped, and I think it’s the same for where we are in Wanchai.”

There's a masculinity to it — it's certainly not very feminine

Aron Harilela

As for London’s 85 rooms compared to Hong Kong’s 210, Harilela admits that “this is going to be a massive test for us. We can do it in London, but this is a bigger product, it’s our home base and it involves much more investment, because we bought the land, bought the buildings, tore them down and built this from scratch. So we have to get this right. And if we do, then our expansion plans – well, we’ll have to think it out. Can we go bigger, 320 rooms? Because that’s the next bracket where the economies of scale really make sense.”

And then, of course, there’s Covid-19 looming above everything – and, not least, the hospitality industry. “Well,” says Harilela, “you can’t open at 90 percent occupancy anyway. You start with 30 percent and then you nudge it up and you nudge it up again. So there’s only going up from here. We can’t go back down – all economies would be on their knees, so we’ll have no option but to open up the borders at some point. People are social animals. Will we be social distancing on planes? Yeah, for a little while, but once this is over I think that everything will go back to normal. I think we’ll go back to what we know best.

“All those years ago when my father built the Holiday Inn Golden Mile, it was at the end of the ’60s, the riots in Hong Kong had just happened and a lot of his external shareholders said, ‘I’m out.’ This is the first hotel I’ve ever built, and then Covid comes along and I said, ‘Come on, this can’t happen again!’”

The post Something About Hari: Aron Harilela Goes Solo appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.

Seated in a corner suite in The Hari, his soon-to-be-completed hotel on that indistinct border where Wanchai and Causeway Bay wash into each other, Aron Harilela looks relaxed and very much at home. The hotel’s soft opening is planned for just a few weeks away, and every one of the floors beneath us is a cacophony of rattling and whining hammer drills, clumping work boots and the clatter of planks and scaffolding. Cables dangle from ceilings and the air is a soup of concrete dust and wood shavings, but if Harilela is concerned about the progress of the first hotel bearing his eminent family’s name – or, to be more accurate, a shortened version of it – to open in his home city, he certainly doesn’t show it.

Virtually a Hong Kong dynasty, the Harilela family has been in the hospitality business for half a century, so why did it take so long for them to go the whole hog and manage their properties themselves? “For years we had one business model,” explains Harilela, “which was to either build or buy hotels, and then give them to third- party management – Holiday Inn, InterContinental, Hilton, W, etcetera. But after 45 years of doing this, the world has changed and the landscape is very different from what it was even 20 years ago. I thought that the hotel market was ripe for something different, with little niches here and there where you could place your hotel.

“So I said let’s do our own hotel, and in about 2010 we started to renovate our London property. At that point I wanted to run the hotel ourselves, but some people in the office said, ‘Listen, what are you doing? We don’t run hotels, we asset manage.’ Weirdly enough, though, my father was very much in favour of running it ourselves. To cut a long story short, we didn’t, but four years later I said, ‘Right, sorry guys, we’ve had enough, we’re going to do it ourselves.’”

The Hari Hong Kong Opens Its Doors on December 12.

After consulting with a branding company on possible names – Harilela says they considered brands based on locations, feelings and personal or family names – they eventually plumped for The Hari, a “mixture between our truncated family name and my father’s name, which resonated with us”. Also, he says, “It’s a name that can travel, it has some gravitas, you can have it in London, you can have it in Bangkok and you can have it in Hong Kong and I don’t think it’s out of place anywhere. It would have been silly to call it The Chesham – our London property’s in Chesham Place, but what does that mean anywhere else?”

Fashioned out of an existing hotel and with just 85 rooms, the London Hari is considerably smaller than its newer sibling in Hong Kong, though there are definite similarities, not least in the fact the famed designer Tara Bernerd was responsible for the interiors of both.

“When we started on the London hotel,” says Harilela, “a hotelier friend, Jason Pomerantz, said, ‘You’ve got to get Tara to do this,’ even though she’d only ever done residential properties before. I said to him, ‘She’s never done hotels, are you crazy?’ But Tara and I got on really well and we created something in London that I think really hit the mark. It’s luxurious but it’s not crazy luxurious and you really feel relaxed – you feel as if you want to come back, regularly.

“I wanted to keep that DNA, so I told Tara that she had to do all The Haris – I don’t want them to look exactly the same but there’s a masculinity to it. It’s not refined luxury and it’s certainly not very feminine.”

Ever a dapper dresser, Harilela today is clad in a bespoke suit in an especially flamboyant blue-and-grey Prince of Wales check, so it seems obvious that the hotel’s look and ambience would also reflect his personal style. “For the first project in London,” he says, “I’d literally walk into Tara’s office and say, ‘I love that tweed jacket, and those grey flannel trousers. That’s what I want to do with the hotel.’ Not only the decor and the clothing, but also in the style of the service. I’m not very poncey and formal, I’m just not. I don’t want to arrive at a restaurant and everyone’s saying, ‘Sir,’ twenty-five times – I mean, just shut up, I’m eating my food. And I’d rather chat with the staff. Maybe it isn’t casual, but it’s certainly not formal, which isn’t the easiest thing to do in Hong Kong, because people are used to that hierarchy.

“If you give me two exact-same hotels, exact-same rooms, exact-same room rates and you go downstairs and one has a buzzing bar and the other one, you go in and the guy says, ‘Er, would you like a cup of tea?’ I’d go to the one with the buzzing bar. When you see what our Japanese restaurant looks like – it’s not designed like a traditional Japanese restaurant. It’s not all bamboo and dark, we’re going to have pumping music and it’s got nothing to do with Japan or Japanese restaurants except the food. We’ve just got a chef from Matsuhisa in Aspen, and I’m so excited about it.”

Harilela isn’t the least bit fazed by the discrepancies in location between the London and Hong Kong hotels. “It doesn’t matter that the Haris in London and Hong Kong are in very different areas,” he says. “Actually, Belgravia [in London] isn’t the best place to put a hotel, because it’s very residential, it’s not that close to the City and the Tube station isn’t that close either, but we really spruced that place up and we’ve done well with it. It’s very London, though, and this is very Hong Kong.

“A few years ago, when we did the W in Sydney, I’d never been there before. It was in Woolloomooloo – and a friend of mine said: ‘Do. Not. Touch. Woolloomooloo. Just don’t touch it, it’s terrible. It’s full of gangs and crime…’ But going to Sydney with new eyes, the one thing I realised was that you go west and you go east and everything is developed, but also that people also love places that are on the water. The hotel is on the water and it’s just a 10-minute walk through the most beautiful botanical gardens to the CBD. This was a pocket that was so overlooked and underdeveloped, and I think it’s the same for where we are in Wanchai.”

There's a masculinity to it — it's certainly not very feminine

Aron Harilela

As for London’s 85 rooms compared to Hong Kong’s 210, Harilela admits that “this is going to be a massive test for us. We can do it in London, but this is a bigger product, it’s our home base and it involves much more investment, because we bought the land, bought the buildings, tore them down and built this from scratch. So we have to get this right. And if we do, then our expansion plans – well, we’ll have to think it out. Can we go bigger, 320 rooms? Because that’s the next bracket where the economies of scale really make sense.”

And then, of course, there’s Covid-19 looming above everything – and, not least, the hospitality industry. “Well,” says Harilela, “you can’t open at 90 percent occupancy anyway. You start with 30 percent and then you nudge it up and you nudge it up again. So there’s only going up from here. We can’t go back down – all economies would be on their knees, so we’ll have no option but to open up the borders at some point. People are social animals. Will we be social distancing on planes? Yeah, for a little while, but once this is over I think that everything will go back to normal. I think we’ll go back to what we know best.

“All those years ago when my father built the Holiday Inn Golden Mile, it was at the end of the ’60s, the riots in Hong Kong had just happened and a lot of his external shareholders said, ‘I’m out.’ This is the first hotel I’ve ever built, and then Covid comes along and I said, ‘Come on, this can’t happen again!’”

The post Something About Hari: Aron Harilela Goes Solo appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.