Posted: 22 Aug 2010 11:11 PM PDT

Breckenridge Town Council on Tuesday will make its final vote on a ballot question to increase the lodging tax by 1 percent to 3.4 percent. This would bring the overall tax paid on hotels, motels, etc. to 11.68 percent, and the increase would put more money into town marketing efforts.

The meeting begins at 7:30 p.m.

The proposed tax increase accompanies two other ordinances up for public hearing Tuesday; one would re-allocate further finances to marketing for five years while the other establishes a town marketing committee to advise the town on use of marketing finances.

If the marketing-committee ordinance is approved, it is the only one to take effect regardless of the outcome on Election Day.

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6 Cool Hotel Bars (PHOTOS)

Posted: 22 Aug 2010 04:38 PM PDT

6 Cool Hotel Bars (PHOTOS)

Hotels can serve many purposes, from simple lodging to cool hangout and they can amp up their cool factor simply by installing swank drinking quarters. These six hotels boast just that: cool cocktails, hip digs and a fun scene.

Have a favorite bar in a hotel? Send us your pictures!

Find a picture, click the participate button, add a title and upload your picture

Bar Novo at Renaissance Chicago Downtown Hotel

Experience the sights, sounds and varying tastes of Basil Tangerine Gimlets and White Rum Mai Tais at this escape in downtown Chicago. Also popular on the list of unique cocktails such as the Cucumber Pepper Margarita.

Tourism: BP to hotels — no oil, no damages

Posted: 22 Aug 2010 09:25 PM PDT

Cash from British oil giant BP LLC is giving a boost to the Panhandle's coastal tourism in these final weeks of the summer season, but other destinations along Florida's Gulf Coast aren't faring as well.

Keith Overton, senior vice president and chief operating officer of the TradeWinds Resort in St. Petersburg Beach, says BP has denied a $2 million claim filed by his waterfront hotel. The claim represented a documented loss of revenue for the 800-room resort from April to June, based on actual revenues from the previous three years.

Overton, also chairman of the Florida Restaurant & Lodging Association, said BP responded that, unless oil from its blown-out well off the coast of Louisiana reached the sands of St. Petersburg Beach, the Tradewinds didn't have a claim for compensation.

"The problems exist beyond the Panhandle," he said.

Spielberg's pricey buyout clause

Universal Orlando and Steven Spielberg finally have an idea of just how much it might cost if the famed Hollywood director ever decides to demand a buyout of his lucrative consulting contract with the theme-park resort.

The answer: Somewhere in the neighborhood of $160 million to $290 million, according to Universal regulatory filings.

Those amounts arose from a calculation conducted to estimate a minimum amount Spielberg would be entitled to should he opt to exercise his right to end the contract. Should that happen, Spielberg, who right now receives a percentage of Universal Orlando's gross revenue in perpetuity, would instead get a one-time payment equal to the fair-market value of his stake in the resort.

Spielberg, who has been a creative consultant for Universal since 1987, would finally have been in a position contractually to demand such a buyout this past spring. But the lucrative provision had complicated Universal's efforts last year to refinance its billion-dollar debt load, forcing the resort to renegotiate with Spielberg late in 2009.

Under the revised agreement, Spielberg's buyout right won't vest until June 2017. But the director gained a number of concessions — including the right to fix values for some of the inputs used to establish a minimum payment.

He did that recently, allowing Universal to calculate a likely range of $160 million to $290 million for his minimum buyout amount.

That's not all the money Spielberg would be owed. Universal Studios Japan is also looking at having to make a minimum payment of $135 million to $245 million. Spielberg is also entitled to similar payments from three other Universal parks — a recently opened resort in Singapore, an under-construction one in South Korea, and a planned one in Dubai — though each of those would have to be open for at least a year before they would factor into any payments.

OIA budget likely to rise 4.5% in fiscal 2011

Orlando International Airport expects to bolster its spending on security, information technology and transportation services next year, leading the way to an overall 4.5 percent increase in its operating budget.

The increase, shown in a preliminary 2011 budget approved last week by the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority, would be fueled by increased income the authority expects in its next fiscal year from airline fees, airport-concessions fees and passenger fees. Overall, the authority expects to take in $374 million next year, up about 8.9 percent from what's expected in the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.

The airport's operating fund would increase to $197 million as a result. Most of the rest of the money would be spent to pay off bond debts.

Meanwhile, the budget for Orlando Executive Airport would be reduced again in 2011 in the plan sent to the GOAA board. That downtown airport expects continued reductions in the income it receievs from airfield operations and from commercial-property rents. The result: its 2011 budget of $2.8 million would be about 5 percent smaller than its current one.

Sara K. Clarke can be reached at skclarke@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5664. Jason Garcia can be reached at jrgarcia@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5414. Scott Powers can be reached at spowers@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5441.

Recalling ‘Green Book,’ Guide for Black Travelers

Posted: 22 Aug 2010 08:16 PM PDT

Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times

A copy of the 1955 edition of "The Negro Motorist Green Book," a travel guide for black Americans during the era of racial discrimination.

For almost three decades beginning in 1936, many African-American travelers relied on a booklet to help them decide where they could comfortably eat, sleep, buy gas, find a tailor or beauty parlor, shop on a honeymoon to Niagara Falls, or go out at night. In 1949, when the guide was 80 pages, there were five recommended hotels in Atlanta. In Cheyenne, Wyo., the Barbeque Inn was the place to stay.

Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times

Calvin Alexander Ramsey at the Auburn Avenue Research Library in Atlanta. He is the author of a play and book about how black travelers found food and lodging before the Civil Rights Act.

A Harlem postal employee and civic leader named Victor H. Green conceived the guide in response to one too many accounts of humiliation or violence where discrimination continued to hold strong. These were facts of life not only in the Jim Crow South, but in all parts of the country, where black travelers never knew where they would be welcome. Over time its full title — "The Negro Motorist Green Book: An International Travel Guide" — became abbreviated, simply, as the "Green Book." Those who needed to know about it knew about it. To much of the rest of America it was invisible, and by 1964, when the last edition was published, it slipped through the cracks into history.

Until he met a friend's elderly father-in-law at a funeral a few years ago, the Atlanta writer Calvin Alexander Ramsey had never heard of the guide. But he knew firsthand the reason it existed. During his family trips between Roxboro, N.C., and Baltimore, "we packed a big lunch so my parents didn't have to worry about having to stop somewhere that might not serve us," recalled Mr. Ramsey, who is now 60.

He is among the writers, artists, academics and curators returning a spotlight to the guide and its author, emblematic as it was of a period when black Americans — especially professionals, salesmen, entertainers and athletes — were increasingly on the move for work, play and family visits.

In addition to hotels, the guide often pointed them to "tourist homes," privates residences made available by their African-American owners. Mr. Ramsey has written a play, "The Green Book," about just such a home, in Jefferson City, Mo., where a black military officer and his wife and a Jewish Holocaust survivor all spend the night just before W. E. B. DuBois is scheduled to deliver a speech in town. The play will inaugurate a staged-reading series on Sept. 15 at the restored Lincoln Theater in Washington, itself once a fixture of that city's "black Broadway" on U Street.

Julian Bond, the civil rights leader who is now a faculty member at American University, will take on a cameo role. Mr. Bond recalled that his parents — his father, a college professor, became the first black president of Lincoln University, in southern Pennsylvania — used the book. "It was a guidebook that told you not where the best places were to eat," he said, "but where there was any place."

In November, Carolrhoda Books will release Mr. Ramsey's "Ruth and the Green Book," a children's book with illustrations by the award-winning artist Floyd Cooper. It tells the story of a girl from Chicago in the 1950s and what she learns as she and her parents, driving their brand-new car to visit her grandmother in rural Alabama, finally luck into a copy of Victor Green's guide. "Most kids today hear about the Underground Railroad, but this other thing has gone unnoticed," said Mr. Ramsey. "It just fell on me, really, to tell the story."

Historians of travel have recognized that the great American road trip — seen as an ultimate sign of freedom — was not that free for many Americans, including those who had to worry about "sunset laws" in towns where black visitors had to be out by day's end.

For a large swath of the nation's history "the American democratic idea of getting out on the open road, finding yourself, heading for distant horizons was only a privilege for white people," said Cotton Seiler, the author of "Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America," who devoted a chapter of his book to the experience of black travelers.

William Daryl Williams, the director of the School of Architecture and Interior Design at the University of Cincinnati, in 2007 organized a traveling exhibition he called "The Dresser Trunk Project," in which he and 11 other architects and artists used the "Green Book" to inform works that incorporated locations and artifacts from the history of black travel during segregation. Mr. Williams's own piece, "Whitelaw Hotel," referred to a well-known accommodation for African-Americans in Washington and included several pages from the "Green Book."

Lonnie Bunch, director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, a co-sponsor of "The Green Book" play reading, said the presence of the guide into the 1960s pointed out that at the same time people were countering segregation with sit-ins, the need to cope with everyday life remained.

Hotels Lodging

Sunday, August 22, 2010

“Public hearing Tuesday on Breckenridge lodging tax increase for ballot” plus 3 more

“Public hearing Tuesday on Breckenridge lodging tax increase for ballot” plus 3 more

Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times

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