Choosing a hotel can be such a headache. Few travelers want to settle for a roach-infested room but many are also reluctant to part with, say, NT$10,000 to NT$20,000, for a place to stay. That's the old guest mentality. The Sheraton Taipei Hotel has spent NT$2.4 billion on renovations in anticipation of the new guest mentality: A hotel is more than just a place to stay.
While the Sheraton's outer appearance hasn't changed much, the renovations begun in April 2003 have just reached completion. There is a new lobby, new restaurants and a new look for the rooms themselves, including two floors of new "executive" rooms, claimed to be the best in Taipei.
Once known as the Lai Lai Sheraton, the 26-year-old hotel is within walking distance from the Executive, Control and Legislative Yuans and has gained a reputation over the years as a favorite hangout for politicians.
PHOTOS: SUNG CHI-HSIUNG, TAIPEI TIMES
Owned by the super-wealthy Tsai family, the Lai Lai became a hotbed of power and intrigue. In 1985, a Tsai-family financial scandal involving the Taipei Tenth Credit Cooperative and Cathay Plastics resulted in the hotel changing hands. In 2002, Tsai brothers Chen Yiang (
Austrian hotelier Josef Dolp was general manager of the hotel in the years leading up to the renovations. While they were underway, he served as general manager at the Sheraton in Xian, China. He returned to his post at the Sheraton Taipei this June.
"The Lai Lai Hotel had an old Chinese feel to it and the design was very local," said Dolp. "We did so much renovation that we also wanted to change the market mix and the kind of custo-mers we attract."
While Dolp acknowledged that his hotel's location meant political clientele would be a mainstay, he said the new target groups are international businesspeople and Taiwanese 30-somethings. This shift is reflected in the hotel's new look and feel, which is clean and structured, simple as opposed to busy, and focuses on functionality and timelessness. These are aesthetic virtues appreciated not only by international businesspeople, but also by young people, according to Dolp.
Owner Tsai Chen-yang and his wife Ellie Lai (
"Our hotel reflects the status quo of the story of Taiwan," Dolp said, pointing to the classical Japanese influence that is most apparent on the rigidly straight, elegant wood that lines bedroom walls.
While a beautiful, comfortable interior is important, it is the process and the experience that will bring customers back and give the hotel a competitive edge, Dolp says.
The management has adopted an approach to service that centers on customer feedback instead of hotel traditions. While it is common practice for the bellboy to whisk away a guest's luggage the moment they check in, surveys revealed this to be an annoyance for many guests, especially businesspeople who want to have their work with them at all times.
The goal, Dolp says, is to make the hotel experience as efficient as possible while still maintaining a friendly, human touch. And despite the amount that was spent on upgrading the hotel's appearance, in the end it's the people and the experience that count for the most.
"It's like a one-night stand with a beautiful lady," Dolp said. "If you find out she's stupid, you won't sleep with her again. So we want to be a beautiful lady who is smart so you'll fall in love and come back over and over again."
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
And so, in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s trip to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), all the experts on the Strait of Hormuz suddenly became experts on US-China-Taiwan relations. The Internet has certainly expanded human knowledge. Lots of these sudden experts made noise this week about Trump’s words after the meeting with PRC dictator Xi Jin-ping (習近平). Trump is going to sell out Taiwan! Longtime Taiwan commentator J. Michael Cole summed the situation up neatly in the Guardian: “We need to keep in mind that he has a tendency to say many things — sometimes contradicting himself within
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
RSS