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The Star
a day ago
- Business
- The Star
How crucial is immigration for the US hotel industry?
The Marriott logo is seen at the New York Marriott Marquis at Times Square in New York, U.S., February 15, 2017. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton/File Photo NEW YORK (Reuters) -A U.S. crackdown on foreign-born workers could spell trouble for the hotel and hospitality industry, which has lobbied for years to expand the pathways for immigration to the United States to help fill over 1 million job vacancies. U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday he would issue an immigration order soon, following a social media post in which he cited labor issues in the farm and hotel industries stemming from his immigration crackdown. But on Friday, the Washington Post reported that no such policy changes were under way, according to three people with knowledge of the administration's immigration policies. IMMIGRATION AND HOSPITALITY In 2024, travel supported the jobs of 15 million U.S. workers and directly employed 8 million, with approximately one-third of those workers immigrants, according to the U.S. Travel Association and American Hotel and Lodging Association. There are about 1 million job openings in 2025. Hotels and resorts have struggled to find enough Americans willing to work hospitality jobs, including seasonal or temporary jobs at ski resorts and amusement parks. The leisure and hospitality industries have quit rates higher than all other industries. The accommodation and food services subsector has experienced a quit rate consistently around or above 4% since July 2022, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. About 71% of the hotels that had job openings were unable to fill them despite active searches, according to a 2024 survey conducted by AHLAand Hireology, an employee management platform. LOBBYING EFFORTS U.S. Travel and AHLA have lobbied Congress for broader pathways for legal immigration in an effort to close these gaps. The industry's priority was to push for expanding the H-2B visa program, which was capped at 66,000 visas a year, to bring more seasonal workers to the United States. In March 2024, then-President Joe Biden signed the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, which authorizes the Department of Homeland Security to increase the number of H-2B temporary nonagricultural workers if the agency determines there are not enough American workers "willing, qualified, and able to perform temporary nonagricultural labor." DHS and the Department of Labor in December published a joint temporary final rule increasing the limit on H-2B non-immigrant visas for fiscal year 2025. The industry also supported legislation that looked to make it easier for temporary workers to return to the U.S. and allow people seeking asylum to work as soon as 30 days after applying for asylum. EXECUTIVE AND UNION VIEWS Industry executives, including those from Marriott and Hilton, have talked about the need for practical immigration solutions for years. "One of the most important issues in our industry for time and eternity has been workforce ... and the need for comprehensive immigration reform," Hilton Worldwide CEO Chris Nassetta said at the Americas Lodging Investment Summit in January, according to a report by Travel Weekly. Labor union Unite HERE, which represents thousands of workers in U.S. hotels, casinos, and airports, a majority of whom are immigrants, said the union will continue to fight "the increasingly arbitrary rules" about who can and cannot live and travel to the United States. The Culinary Workers Union, which represents hospitality workers in Las Vegas, rallied against escalating Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in Nevada and pushed back against claims the Trump administration was only responding to people breaking the law. (Reporting by Doyinsola Oladipo in New York; additional reporting by Aishwarya Jain in Bengaluru; editing by Rod Nickel)
The Star
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Star
Why the revolving restaurant is making a comeback
When your ears pop on the elevator ride up, that's how you know you've arrived at the View, the revolving bar and restaurant on the 47th and 48th floors of the New York Marriott Marquis in the United States. On a recent Saturday evening, the restaurant thrummed with families, groups of friends and couples sipping champagne and devouring seafood towers as they admired the changing skyline. Every 45 minutes, just enough time to leisurely imbibe a cocktail, the lounge makes a full in Times Square in 1985 and closed in 2020, the View is the latest in a string of rotating restaurants to make an unlikely return, this one shepherded by restaurateur Danny Meyer and architect David Rockwell. Gone are the outdated pleather dining chairs and gaudy carpet, replaced by blue velvet banquettes, a black marble bar and elegant Art Deco-style glass installations."This is one of the best views,' said Joseph Mirrone, a former New Yorker who had stopped by with his son for a post-theatre coffee and dessert. "You can sit in one spot and the whole city revolves around you.' Meyer, who has his own warm childhood memories of Stouffer's Top of the Riverfront, a revolving restaurant in St Louis, was eager to update the form. The View, the revolving restaurant and lounge atop the New York Marriott Marquis, in Manhattan, which completes a rotation every 45 minutes at the lounge level and every hour at the restaurant level. Photos: Yuvraj Khanna/The New York Times "When Marriott approached us, it felt like, OK, well, that's something we've never done before,' he said. "When else is someone going to say, 'Would you like to do a revolving restaurant in the theatre district?'' Revolving restaurants are widely regarded as novelties, relics of the 1960s and '70s, when skylines surged ever higher and architects wanted to give the public a front seat to the rapid development happening around them. La Ronde, a restaurant above the Ala Moana shopping centre in Honolulu, was the first in the United States, opening to the public in 1961. Its architect, John Graham Jr, best known for his work on the Space Needle in Seattle, patented the design. It required the construction of a wheeled turntable that could move around a stationary core, like a train on rails. The restaurant inspired countless imitators, in cities large and small, with names that alluded to their singular party trick: the Changing Scene, in Rochester, New York; the Spindletop, in Houston; the Eagle's Nest in Indianapolis; and the Summit, in Detroit, all promised a dining experience unlike any other. Architect John C. Portman Jr incorporated them into a handful of the hotels he designed in Atlanta, Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as the US$400mil (RM1.8bil) Marriott Marquis. "Revolving restaurants, like most of the other aspects of this building, are a show that has been playing out of town for a long time and has never much been missed on Broadway,' Paul Goldberger, The New York Times architecture critic, wrote in a 1985 review of the hotel. "But this will at least be a novelty.' Visual landmarks throughout the restaurant and lounge help guests and servers alike navigate the space at the View. The review may have presaged the beginning of the end: La Ronde closed in the 1990s after its machinery failed. The Summit became too expensive to maintain, and shuttered in 2000. Skies, at the Hyatt Regency in Kansas City, Missouri, went out of business in 2011 as the hotel's guests increasingly opted to dine off site. Stouffer's Top of the Riverfront permanently closed in 2014. Others remain open for service but ceased spinning: Both the Sun Dial in Atlanta and the restaurant atop the Reunion Tower in Dallas were the sites of gruesome accidents. The former Summit space in Detroit houses a new restaurant, but remains stationary more than 25 years after it stopped turning. But what goes around tends to come back around: the Polaris in Atlanta got moving again in 2022 with a sustainable, farm-to-table menu. In 2024, the Equinox, the revolving restaurant atop the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, was put back into motion after an 18-year hiatus, using hydraulics to get it going. The San Francisco Chronicle reported last April that plans are underway to reopen it to the public as a bar called Club Meyer, the return of revolving restaurants feels part and parcel of the post-pandemic dining shift. Diners are craving "small bistros and neighbourhood places, and places that turned up the dial on the experience, the kind of thing you could never get at home', he said. "We're doing both.' An alcove with a piano is another visual landmark at the View, atop the New York Marriott Marquis, in Manhattan. Rockwell, who first visited the Marquis lounge in 1986, said the opportunity to work on the View was "irresistible'. After only a few years of disuse, the restaurant's mechanics operated just fine; most of his work involved giving the restaurant its 'Mad Men-era aesthetic' while being thoughtful about the experience of dining in a moving building. An image in the public domain shows the design for the rotating restaurant was patented by Graham Jr, one of the designers of the Space Needle in Seattle. Photo: The New York Times To help diners and servers find their tables — it's common for visitors to become slightly disoriented when they return from the restroom — the firm added visual landmarks: a dramatic spiral staircase between the lounge and the restaurant, an alcove for a live piano player and an impossible-to-miss raw bar. "People hear 'rotating restaurant' and they think it's going to be moving fast, like they're on a carnival ride,' said Charlie Stoop, a bartender at the View. "But it's really not like that. It's a really slow journey.' (The lounge rotates about 8ft (2.4m) per minute.)So far, the new View has been well received. Julio Montalvo, who was drinking cocktails with a friend in the lounge, used to visit the restaurant before the 2020 closing, he said, but stopped after the food and service declined. The high-end cocktails in the new edition won him over. Lois Blank and Keesie Spector, both 83 and friends since they were 13, had also stopped by for a tipple. They last visited the View more than a decade ago, but after hearing news about the renovations, decided to return. "It's very nice,' Blank said. "Lovely,' Spector chimed in. Perhaps the View, the Loupe Lounge, Polaris and others might inspire even more revolving restaurant revivals. "There's an inherent magic in dining while the world spins around you,' said Daniel A. Nadeau, a general manager at the Marquis. "I'll be curious to see if this sparks a little revolving renaissance.' – ©2025 The New York Times Company This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
