VICEROY NEW YORK: THE FIRST YEAR
Viceroy New York opened on October 9 and since then, has been a rapidly growing success story for Viceroy.
Walshe explains: “What we’ve been doing over the last number of months as seasonality has changed is bringing different components of the hotel to market. So we opened with a lot of our rooms, we didn’t have the penthouse suite open, that’s now done and launched, the restaurant Kingside with Marc Murphy, who is a very well known celebrity chef in the US, went within a month of opening on what they call the heat map in New York; that is a gauge on the most demanding tables in Manhattan. They do it based on reservations demand and critical reviews. We went to number one on the heat map within a month. It’s still the hottest table in town.”
He acknowledges that “the first quarter in New York was dreadful” thanks to the “weather intervention”, but “as soon as the snow melted, towards end February we opened The Roof. The Gerber Group in New York run the bars, originally founded by Scott Gerber and Randy Gerber, Randy being Cindy Crawford’s husband. So we opened The Roof, which is our bar on the 29th floor, an inside outside space with views directly over to Central Park and that has just gone mental. It’s really cool. The whole hotel is almost Mad Men-esque, it’s quite a masculine feel but not darkly so and it’s just cool. We did a photoshoot at the hotel and created our first video for a hotel using Dubai-based Insignia, now our brand agency.”
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