NYC hotels often get into all sorts of dotty troubles, but the Pod Hotel, located in Manhattan’s midtown East neighbourhood, is literally in a ’spot’ of trouble. The funky budget hotel, it seems, based its marketing material and bedding on a design a bit too close to the Eames Dot Pattern by Charles and Ray Eames, according to a recent copyright infringement lawsuit. The settlement requires the Pod Hotel to remove all of its dot pattern from bedding and cease to use the pattern on its website and brochures. 

I went through the hotel’s website, but ain’t no dots anywhere. Bedding’s in the private pods are red and the bunks are green, but plain - no design, no dots, nothing. But then, I checked out flickr, and what do you know - Caught the infringing dotty design red-handed. You can see it clearly in the picture. Photo by culturecat via flickr (creative commons).

And speaking of troubles for the City’s hotels, Jeff Bernstein, Urbandigs.com, says that hotels in New York are in for a tough time, and not just because of slack bookings. Says that for the past few years,  NYC has enjoyed an unprecedented boom which was a boomerang effect of the downturn after 9/11. And that room rates, hotel values and new projects have been going up at a frenetic pace, in tandem with the rising occupancy rates.

With hotel values following on the heels of the vastly improving fundamentals, developers moved quickly to accommodate demand for new hotels. In fact, as of today, there is a backlog of projects that will reportedly add 20 percent to the current room base of 77,000. The only problem is that by rushing out to buy sites for hotels, developers were jamming up prices of land in an already over-heated New York City land market… according to my sources hotel bookings after the holiday season in New York are looking dismal. Rates are reportedly going to be down big time.

Also says that even though the downturn will stop the flow of additional rooms being added to New York’s inventory, it still won’t be enough to stop hotels rates from dropping. Point of all this blather being that New York vacations are going to be a lot cheaper next year, so you might want to rethink attending that New Year’s eve bash on Times Square. Drop the ball, so to speak…

Posted on November 1st, 2008 by Thomas
Filed under: Hotels, NYC