It won’t have that many rooms–only 333–but the new Peninsula Chicago Hotel, located at Rush Street and Chicago Avenue, will have a pedigree unlike any of the city’s other hotels. Scheduled to open in the spring, the hotel will bring a touch of Asia to the city’s skyline.
Like the Park Hyatt Hotel, situated across Chicago Avenue from the Peninsula, it will have many of the amenities found in the world’s most exclusive five-star hotels. But Peninsula Chicago isn’t the typical American hotel. Owned by Hong Kong and Shanghai Hotels Ltd., it will be the company’s sixth worldwide.
While small, the hotel company has been around for a long time. For years, the only hotel it operated was the one in Hong Kong, which opened in 1960.
“We’ve wanted to come to Chicago for a long time,” said Michael Kadoorie, chairman of Hong Kong and Shanghai Hotels, who was recently in Chicago to inspect the hotel’s construction progress. “But it only became an Asia gateway in the last two years.”
United Airlines and Japan Air Lines have provided service to Tokyo since the early 1980s. But it wasn’t until two years ago that United began providing non-stop service to Hong Kong. Kadoorie says the hotel will be targeting that market.
Unlike most American hotels, 25 percent of Peninsula’s rooms will be suites.
“Service is one of the keys in any hotel and it is a strong element of the Peninsula,” Kadoorie said. “We do our best to cultivate a sense of being in a family.”
That’s what Kadoorie hopes guests will remember after they leave–the elegance and service they received.
Many, however, will remember the hotel’s gee-whiz, high-tech goodies that can be found at every turn in the room. Need to know the temperature outside? It’s displayed on an electronic board alongside the door.
Like most upscale hotels, guests will find a telephone in the bath. But unlike others, this phone is a hands-free device. Guests can talk while taking a shower or drawing a bath because special circuitry has been built into the phone to filter out the sound of running water.
The silent fax is hidden in a drawer in the desk. And the room’s occupant won’t get the previous guest’s faxes because a new fax number is assigned when the next guest checks in. And the machine will store the faxes until the guest chooses to print them.
Rather than just a telephone and radio on the bedside table, guests of a Peninsula Hotel find an electronic console that controls the lights, which can dim gradually as a guest drifts off to sleep; adjusts the level of sound of the room’s entertainment/television system; and summons room service.
Need a shoe shine? Just put your shoes in a box hidden in the wall, Kadoorie says. When you arise in the morning, the shoes will be back in the box brightly buffed.
Topping out the 20-story hotel, which is perched on top of the block square shopping complex at Chicago and Michigan Avenues, is a two-story health club. And the swimming pool isn’t the typical 10-meter affair. The Peninsula’s pool will be 25 meters, half the length of an Olympic-size pool.
Full dining services will be provided in four restaurants. And in keeping with its roots, the hotel will offer Chinese dim sum menu at its Shanghai Terrace restaurant.
Such amenities don’t come cheap. A typical room goes for $425 per night. But a “junior executive suite” can be booked for $485. The hotel’s grandest suite, the Peninsula Suite, will command $4,500 a night.
Prices going up: The three-year-old effort by the Chicago Convention & Tourism Bureau to get the city’s hospitality industry to hold the line on prices appears to be slipping.
The latest edition of the Zagat restaurant survey, the 2001 Chicago Restaurant Survey, says the average price of a dinner, which includes a glass of wine, has risen 13 percent in the past two years to $28.32 from $25.06. That’s well above the 5.1 percent increase in the consumer price index during the same time period.
The increase could be disheartening for city officials, who two years ago seeking to rein in rapidly rising costs for trade show attendees negotiated steep cuts in labor costs along with an agreement by the city’s hotels to control their prices.
While independent restaurants were not asked directly to rein in price increases, it was expected that competitive pressure from hotel-connected restaurants would prevent big price leaps.
A spokeswoman for the Illinois Restaurant Association disputed the Zagat increase, noting that a recent survey of all Chicago restaurants by the federal government shows prices have risen a little more than 4 percent during the past two years.
