Is Hilton Happy to Be Free of Denizen Hotels?
Hilton’s plan to build another luxury brand has come to a screaming halt now that it has put the frothy folks behind the new Denizen Hotels project on paid administrative leave. Apparently the bright boys behind the project–Ross Klein and Amar Lalvani and a so-called “luxury and lifestyle team”–walked off with more than 100,000 paper and electronic files when they defected from Starwood last summer. At least that’s what Starwood claims in a lawsuit filed last week against Hilton in a New York federal district court. And there seems to be at least some basic truth to the accusation since Hilton returned eight boxes of files and documents to Starwood even before the lawsuit was filed. At Starwood, Klein and Lalvani were credited with developing the W brand as well as the just-launched Aloft and Element chains. Denizen was supposedly aimed at the luxury segment, where Hilton already has two brands (Conrad and Waldorf Astoria) and the market is flooded with oversupply and suffering throu
