Who wants to stay at the Four Seasons New York?
The high-end hotel chain is slated to reopen its Midtown location in September after a four-year closure.
Guests soon will again be able to book a stay at the Four Seasons at 57 E. 57th St., its Toronto-based operating company quietly announced in a press release earlier this month, although it’s unclear when reservations will begin or when the hotel’s planned “enhancements,” as its website calls them, are expected to wrap.
Owned by billionaire Beanie Babies magnate Ty Warner, the five-star, 368-room hotel between Madison and Park avenues, closed in March 2020 at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and hasn’t reopened since. Warner and the hotel’s operator, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, had reportedly been in the middle of a dispute over profitability and fee structures but apparently came to an agreement in order to reopen in a few months, the Canadian chain said in a June 11 statement while jointly announcing the spring 2025 reopening of another Four Seasons resort, The Biltmore Santa Barbara.
The deal includes selling off a certain number of rooms at the luxury hotel as residential units in order to make it financially feasible to continue operating — 50 of the 368 rooms would be converted to residential, according to the New York Post. Suzanne Hallberg, a spokeswoman for the Four Seasons, declined to comment on that agreement or any other renovations planned for the property, which is just steps from Central Park.
Vijay Dandapani, president and CEO of the Hotel Association of New York City, however, confirmed the move to Crain’s Friday and described it as “almost certainly a financial decision” as the industry has yet to bounce back from the pandemic. Early in the Covid crisis, doctors stayed at the inn for free while taking care of patients at Upper East Side hospitals. Dandapani mentioned that more than 16,000 hotel rooms are currently being used for other services such as housing migrants and are not available for tourists, which Crain’s reported back in April.
Already an internationally acclaimed chain, the Four Seasons took social media by storm last month after the video of a 1-year-old girl raising her hand in excitement about staying at the brand’s Orlando location went viral.
Julianne Cuba , 2024-06-21 19:21:12
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