Luxury Hotel Glut

The owners of a new, ultraluxury hotel maintain an air of confidence in the face of adversity. The 234-room Pangu Plaza, which opened in December, charges as much as $17,750 a night for a suite. The sushi bar, where the cheapest lunch special is $265, cooks its rice in mineral water flown in from Japan. The walls in the hotel are covered with silk; the floors with marble—Italian, of course."The Chinese new rich have plenty of money. We have Bentleys pulling up with no number plates, so you can tell that they're brand new," said room manager Dennis Seng, scoffing at the suggestion of inauspicious timing for opening a luxury hotel."The other day, a Russian couple ran up a $4,000 tab at an intimate lunch for two in the Japanese restaurant," he said.His confidence, however, is belied by the cavernous, empty lobby, where the only sound is the tapping of the high heels of the crisply attired staff. No paying customers were evident during a weekday afternoon visit, although Seng said occupancy has reached "up to 30 percent."Read OnTalk about bad timing on these places. The ultra-luxury hotel development in China probably couldn't have come at a worse time.I've actually thought about China and the timing of its "coming of age" a number of times: just as China was getting its infrastructure developed and modernity going in earnest, the global economy collapses.Talk about bittersweet timing.China, whose twentieth century is marked by famines and extreme poverty while the rest of the world was booming, is getting its legs cut out from under it just as it was starting to enjoy the fruits western nations have enjoyed for decades.Just looking at the situation on its surface and without getting into the root causes, I feel sorry for China and those who were beginning to finally have the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of a modern economy.I believe that the reality that things are changing in a different direction very quickly will be especially hard for the Chinese to accept. This can be seen in the way the hotel room manager in the article I just referenced spoke about his new hotel:
China has a lot of rich people. Rich people like to show off and use their money. Of course this hotel and the expansion that China has made will be OK.I'm not confident that the incredible amount of opulent and, often, over-priced luxury items and services China has recently developed will survive the global economic downturn that is just beginning.