Wasn't that Hilton a Marriott last week?

The hotel at 2100 Massachusetts Avenue NW near Dupont Circle in Washington has changed names. Again.

When Al Gore grew up there in the '50s and '60s, the building was called the Fairfax Hotel, and it was home to the Jockey Club, a saloon for Washington's power players. The last time I stayed there, about a decade ago, it was called the Ritz-Carlton. But the sheik who owned the property fell out with Ritz and peevishly renamed it "the hotel formerly known as Ritz-Carlton." Then it became the Luxury Collection, the Westin Fairfax, and the Westin Embassy Row. The sign on the door now says "The Fairfax at Embassy Row."

The Fairfax is what lodging insiders derisively call a "Velcro hotel" -- a property that changes brand names so often that hotel signs may as well be fastened with hook-and-loop tape. There are dozens of infamous Velcro hotels around the nation and thousands more properties that have changed brand affiliations -- the industry calls it "reflagging" -- at least once in the last decade.

Business travelers joke about Velcro hotels too. They tell tales of going to sleep in a Hilton and waking up in a Marriott, of seeing signs hastily obscured with black plastic, of the breakfast menus on the doorknob changing in the middle of the night, and even of hotel staffers fluffing lobby ashtrays so that the former chain's logo, ostentatiously stamped in the sand, is obliterated.

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Source - Washingon Post


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