There is a good chance you’ve never heard of Triumph Hotels. But if you are visiting the Big Apple, you might very well want to stay in one of their hotels.
Most hotel chains don’t own their properties. From the most venerable names, such as Four Seasons and Ritz-Carlton, to the $69 a night airport motels, most brand names are managers on behalf of owners or reservation and marketing tools for franchisees. At the opposite end of the hospitality spectrum are owner operated properties, often one offs.
In between these two extremes sits Triumph, a group of half a dozen boutique and very neighborhood centric New York City hotels. They are 100% owner operated, and the owners are passionate about one thing above all - New York’s neighborhoods.
“We are a collection of hotels, not a chain. Our differentiators are that we have six different hotels in six very different neighborhoods, all owner operated, and we don’t just incorporate the neighborhood into our properties, we are in the neighborhood - we also live there,” Triumph COO Brett Blass told me. “The owners are two second and third generation real estate and hotel developers in the city, and they grew up in New York, grew up in hotels, they love it and they want to share it. Both the company and the hotels are staffed with people who have been affiliated with them for 10, 20 or 30 years.”
I recently stayed at The Frederick, a Triumph property in Tribeca, and I got the company message loud and clear. I chose the hotel specifically because I was in the city to visit the 9/11 Museum for work, and The Frederick is within easy walking distance of the World Trade Center site. But it turned out that like me, many guests choose Triumph’s hotels because in each neighborhood they are within easy walking distance of the things people come to New York for - whether its business or pleasure.
Triumph’s best known and most luxurious property - by the more conventional definition of luxury - is The Iroquois, with its Adam Tihany designed rooms and suites, one of the best French eateries in midtown, Triomphe, and Prohibition-style cocktail lounge Lantern’s Keep. But to the owners, luxury means something more, as Blass explained. “It all depends upon your definition. I think having staff who know the neighborhood and really care about guests having a good experience is its own luxury.” While The Iroquois has 114 rooms, “The Edison is an 800-plus room hotel in the middle of Times Square, yet when you walk in our staff is actively seeking out guests, interacting, making sure they have all their plans set, helping them decide what to do and see. It gets a leisure crowd who want to be in the middle of everything and we enthusiastically help them do that.” The Edison also has one of the most popular watering holes in the Times Square area, the Rum House.
How does Triumph embrace its neighborhoods? There are myriad ways, starting with architecturally significant or historic buildings, and one of the biggest wrinkles of the company model is free guided neighborhood walking tours offered at all the properties, in conjunction with custom/private guide service Streetwise New York. Many guests love these tours so much that the next time they book a different hotel to explore and learn about a different neighborhood.
Triumph also has a policy of partnering with successful and popular Big Apple restaurateurs and barkeeps to bring a distinctive and non-corporate food and beverage feel to each of the properties, many of which have smart, comfortable, “home away for home” adult beverage vibes. The Frederick has an outpost of locally popular Italian chain Serafina, The Edison an outpost of family run Friedman’s, and The Evelyn has three different Mediterranean and Italian concepts by acclaimed chef Jonathan Benno, who came to notoriety at Per Se, one of the city’s toniest eateries, and made culinary headlines when he simultaneously opened his trio here during a revamp of the hotel.
Previously Triumph also partnered with top local gyms, cycling, yoga and fitness studios to give its guests access, but as they have added and expanded their own fitness centers they moved away from this model. However, each hotel hosts a manager’s reception twice weekly, in part to quiz guests an on their wants, likes and dislikes, and recently they have decided to add more programming aimed at solo women travelers, which Blass feels is an underserved part of the travel market. As a result of feedback, they are looking at bringing in yoga instructors for additional weekly classes.
But it was the level of hyper-local detail that was the most impressive to me: hotels go so far in this as to use different toiletries sourced from neighborhood retailers or salons (the Iroquois uses venerable pharmacist C.O. Bigelow, the Frederick Five Wits from hip downtown salon Blackstone’s) and they even use local florists. Some elements are so well incorporated to give each hotel a sense of place you don’t consciously notice, while others - like the giant tile wall mural of an antique map of lower Manhattan in the oversized walk-in shower at my room at the Edison, could not be missed. It was such a nice touch that I took a picture and decided to incorporate a tile mural into my own home bathroom renovation.
Other than the boutique Iroquois, most of the Triumph properties are upper mid-range upscale but not conventionally luxurious properties, offering good values. The collection covers six distinct neighborhoods, including the residential Upper West Side (Belleclaire); Theater District (Washington Jefferson); Midtown (Iroquois); NoMad (Evelyn) and Tribeca (Frederick)
The company’s strategy has been to find buildings with significant history and architectural value, then renovate them extensively. Currently under this kind of transformation is the Belleclaire on the Upper West Side, which just got a new lobby, is about to receive a new bar, and will have another restaurant and likely rooftop bar added in the future. “It has amazing bones, and when it’s done it is gong to be one of out most exciting hotels. The neighborhood was craving something like this, and it has some really special attributes, like the rooftop.” He’s right - my sister lives in the neighborhood, I spend a lot of time there, and while the food scene on the Upper West Side has improved dramatically in recent years, and there is great access to both Riverside and Central Parks and the Museum of Natural History, there are very few decent hotel options. The rooms at the Belleclaire are remaining open through the transformation, which is being done like the hotels in Vegas do, in a way that is mostly hidden and unobtrusive. I recently popped in to check out the new lobby and was very impressed, it looked great, and you can’t even tell construction is going on. I look forward to seeing it in its final form. It should be a great addition to the neighborhood, and that’s the entire Triumph concept
