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Last week, a press release IHG sent out caught my eye. The chain has opened a new Crowne Plaza property in Manhattan which it’s calling the brand’s flagship property and which it describes as an “Iconic new hotel in Manhattan’s Times Square [which] reflects the brand’s bold vision for the future of blended travel“.
Flagship and iconic were words that piqued my interest, and I definitely wanted to know more about this “bold vision” that was mentioned. So I took a look into it, and it wasn’t really what I was expecting.
Overview
The Crowne Plaza Manhattan Times Square is a 685-room, 22-storey property which sits at 790 7th Avenue. It was developed by Al Rayyan Tourism Investment Company (ARTIC) and is managed by Highgate and the relevance of that will become clearer a little later.
This isn’t a new build. Until the refurbishment it traded as The Manhattan at Times Square, an independent hotel, and before that it spent years as the Sheraton Manhattan.
This was also supposed to be a W Hotel.
ARTIC signed an agreement with Starwood in 2015 to convert the property, backed by a $250 million renovation and due to open by the end of 2017. Marriott bought Starwood the following year and that plan quietly died, so eleven years on it has opened as a Crowne Plaza instead.
So, what else do we know?
Well, based on the information IHG has provided and that appears on the hotel’s website, facilities are thin.
There’s a 24-hour fitness centre, a business centre and “free WiFi”. That seems to be it.
There’s no pool, no spa, and no club lounge, although that last one is hoping for far too much from a US Crowne Plaza property.
The main dining option is called Fifty-First Street Social. This is an American restaurant located off the lobby with its own street entrance. There’s also a Crowne Plaza Marketplace that, confusingly, the hotel’s website describes as “coming soon” in one place and as an existing lobby shop in another.
No menus or prices for either are published anywhere that I can find.
Location
790 7th Avenue sits between 51st and 52nd Streets, which is how the restaurant got its name. That’s about seven blocks north of Times Square.
IHG’s own “what’s nearby” list gives you Radio City Music Hall at 0.20 miles, MoMA at 0.30 miles and the Museum of Broadway at 0.40 miles, and doesn’t mention Times Square at all. When a hotel with Times Square in its name leaves Times Square off the list, that tells you something.
To be fair, this is a fairly good location if you’re in town to check off the major sights.
Rockefeller Center and the theatre district are close, Central Park is a short walk north, and the 7th Ave/53rd St subway is 0.1 miles away so transport links are ok.
Plenty of people would rather be here than in the middle of Times Square (I certainly would), but if you book expecting to step out of the lobby into the chaos that is Times Square, you’ll be disappointed and you’ll have a 10 minute walk ahead of you.
The rooms
There appear to be more than 15 room and suite types at this flagship Crowne Plaza property, and the names, sizes and prices don’t line up in any way that’s easy to summarise.
Seriously. I’ve looked through the hotel website and the IHG booking engine and some things just don’t make sense.
The entry-level room appears to be the 1 Queen Standard at 250 sq ft (23 sqm) and there’s nothing odd about that.
On the suite side, a room the hotel calls a “Junior Suite” is listed as being 1,016 sq ft (94 sqm) and looks nothing like a Junior suite.
While what appears to be the cheapest full suite (“one bedroom suite”) is just 550 sq ft (51 sqm) in size.
What’s that all about?
And given that the Manhattan Floor is 18 floors up out of 22 (the hotel’s website calls these 18th-floor rooms, although the press release describes the Manhattan Level as being on the “upper floors”, so take your pick), who’s choosing a queen bed and 250 sq ft of space over a king bed and 280 sq ft of space when they both cost the same.
No, this isn’t an outlier, I saw this pricing oddity appear over and over again and it just doesn’t make any sense.
And here’s the oddest part. The Manhattan Floor rooms, the ones IHG describes as an “elevated stay experience” with skyline views and upscale amenities, are consistently cheaper than the identical room type without the Manhattan Floor designation.
I checked multiple dates and the pattern held every time.
The 1 Queen Premium Manhattan Floor undercut the plain 1 Queen Premium, the 1 King Premium Manhattan Floor undercut the 1 King Premium, and the two-queen rooms did the same thing as well.
I don’t know whether the revenue management team hasn’t been told that the Manhattan Floor is special or whether nobody at the hotel thinks it is. Either way, if you want the higher floor you’re rewarded for it with a lower price and I’m pretty that isn’t how things are supposed to work.
The destination fee
The hotel charges a mandatory destination fee of $40 per room per night. When you add the city and state taxes levied on the fee to that, it’s $45.90 a night.
Importantly, it applies to award stays. Like Marriott and unlike Hyatt and Hilton, IHG does not waive rip-off fees on award bookings.
This is what the destination fee covers, according to IHG’s terms:
- Unlimited local, long-distance and international phone calls
- Premium high-speed WiFi for unlimited devices
- PressReader access to newspapers and magazines
- $10 Citi Bike credit per guest, per stay
- Unlimited use of the 24/7 fitness centre
- 25% off hop-on hop-off bus tours
Gratuities aren’t included, and the Citi Bike credit is per stay rather than per night.
For comparison, the property’s own page tells us that “Complimentary Wi-Fi runs throughout”.
And it shows the fitness centre with an “average charge” of $0.
Worse yet, the fee doesn’t appear anywhere on the hotel’s own website (at the time of writing), and it only appears in the IHG booking engine once you reach a booking total (if you have your page set to “include taxes and fees” when viewing the nightly cost).
Whatever happened to clear disclosure? If you’re going to rip people off, at least have the guts to point it out.
What it costs
I’ve checked cash and award pricing for every bookable night from September 2026 to the middle of August 2027, when the calendar closes, so we have average room costs in dollars and points for every month.
Cash rates include taxes and fees, so because the destination fee is charged on award stays as well as cash stays, the value below is what a point is actually worth here once you’ve deducted the $45.90 you’ll pay regardless:
- September 2026: $476 or 65,429 points +$45.90, 0.66 cents per point
- October 2026: $430 or 59,067 points +$45.90, 0.65 cents per point
- November 2026: $331 or 48,033 points +$45.90, 0.59 cents per point
- December 2026: $490 or 75,700 points +$45.90, 0.59 cents per point
- January 2027: $202 or 29,355 points +$45.90, 0.53 cents per point
- February 2027: $184 or 26,643 points +$45.90, 0.52 cents per point
- March 2027: $230 or 34,129 points +$45.90, 0.54 cents per point
- April 2027: $278 or 41,833 points +$45.90, 0.55 cents per point
- May 2027: $343 or 52,581 points +$45.90, 0.57 cents per point
- June 2027: $343 or 52,900 points +$45.90, 0.56 cents per point
- July 2027: $344 or 54,516 points +$45.90, 0.55 cents per point
- August 2027: $346 or 54,765 points +$45.90, 0.55 cents per point
Across all 347 priced nights that’s an average of $332 or 49,346 points, and 0.58 cents per point after the fee. Without the fee it would be 0.67 cents, so the fee costs you 14% of the redemption value. Fun!
At this point, there are two other things worth noting.
Firstly, the award rates are dynamic and track the cash rates almost exactly, so there’s no sweet spot to hunt for.
Secondly, even though this is a brand-new property, it doesn’t appear on IHG’s list for the 15% discount on award bookings at new and refurbished hotels at the time of writing. Let’s hope it gets added.
Thoughts
Let’s start with the destination (rip-off) fee, because it’s a slightly worse one than usual.
Two of the six things it supposedly pays for are listed as free on the hotel’s own website. Of the four left, one is a $10 credit that covers the entire stay (so you don’t get a new credit every night), one is a discount on a bus tour you may not want to take, one is a newspaper app which next to no one needs, and one is free phone calls from the room (presumably for all those guests who don’t travel with a phone and a rate plan).
What a pile of garbage.
To highlight how bad this can be, allow me to point out that on an average February night, the destination fee adds a 25% surcharge on the room rate. That’s ridiculous. Is this Manhattan or Vegas?
Then there’s the flagship question.
The Manhattan at Times Square (this property’s previous name before the makeover) scored 5.8 out of 10 on Booking.com across more than 6,500 reviews, with cleanliness at 6.4 and facilities at 5.7.
On TripAdvisor, things look worse. Here it gets an overall rating of 3.6 out of 5 with service at 3.6 and cleanliness at 3.5 from almost 14,000 reviews.
That’s worrying for any hotel, but it’s especially worrying for a hotel that IHG is now putting on a pedestal as a “flagship” hotel.
Now, at this point a lot of people will probably think that I’m being a little unfair bringing those scores up because those were scores attributed to a property that, technically at least, no longer exists. That was then and this is now. This is a shiny new flagship property that deserves a new start.
Well … yes and no.
Everyone deserves a second chance and I’m happy to give it one, but I do have one slight concern.
You see, the property may have had a new coat of paint, four rooms may have been stripped out, and everywhere may be filled with new furniture, but under the surface two key things haven’t changed.
ARTIC still owns the property and Highgate still manages it, and those were the two entities in charge through the years it was earning those terrible scores.
Same owner, same operator, same building, and just four fewer rooms than it had before. The only really big difference now is that IHG is marketing it and calling it a flagship property.
It also seems that this flagship may not be quite ready for prime time.
Two room types still have no photography and show a sample image instead, the press release calls the upper-floor product the “Manhattan Level” while the booking engine calls it the “Manhattan Floor” (minor, but sloppy), the hotel’s site tells you to phone in to book the 18th-floor rooms that IHG.com is already selling online, and the Broadway Suite, the 22nd-floor penthouse the press release describes as the pinnacle of the experience, has a “Book Now” button that drops you into a list of room types that doesn’t include it.
None of that is disastrous and I’m sure that these things will be tidied up, but a flagship Crowne Plaza is meant to be the thing you put up as an example to all other Crowne Plazas, and I’m not sure this one is setting an example that should be followed.
Bottom line
Every bookable night still beats our 0.4 cents valuation for IHG One Rewards points, so if you want to be in midtown and you have the points, this works.
But the $40 rip-off destination fee (really $45.90) is charged on award stays as well as cash ones, so that makes the value you’re getting noticeably worse.
More importantly, however, what I can’t work out is why this is the flagship Crowne Plaza for the US.
It’s a converted independent with a thin facilities list, a fee that supposedly covers at least two items the hotel advertised as free, some of the room names make no sense, the signature suite doesn’t seem to appear in the booking engine, and it continues to be owned and run by the same entities that, according to thousands of reviews, ran the hotel that this is replacing (at least in name) remarkably badly.
Crowne Plaza has been telling us for a while that it’s transforming its estate. If this is the property chosen to represent that, the bar is a lot lower than I expected it to be.
Link to the Crowne Plaza Manhattan Times Square homepage