Sunday, February 10, 2013
LITTLE ROCK — The Capital Hotel may not have a four- or five-star Forbes Travel Guide rating yet, but the upscale hostelry is drawing critical attention in the meantime.
The TripAdvisor website has the downtown Little Rock hotel ranked 15th best in the nation.
That’s eight places above The Hermitage Hotel in Nashville, Tenn., which, interestingly, has a Forbes five-star rating.
TripAdvisor may not have the cachet of Forbes (formerly Mobil), but its ratings this goround may bode well for the Capital Hotel, which has taken an almost blase tone in public statements about its rating, or lack of it.
The Capital is not rated by Forbes, whose annual report is due out Feb. 26.
Earlier this year, a Forbes official hinted strongly that things could change in its view of the Capital.
If it makes the grade, the state technically will have two Forbes rated hotels.
The Peabody Little Rock hotel, which is in transition to become a Marriott, holds a four star rating. But it remains to be seen whether it will retain it after the changeover, which could take six months.
The only Marriott hotel in the world with four stars is in Shanghai. None have five.
U.S. News & World Report rates the Capital No. 57 on its list of the 164 best hotels in the country.
Not to pick on the Hermitage, but it’s No. 84 on the list. Little Rock is a smaller, slower version of Nashville, it seems to me. There are regional similarities that lend themselves to the comparison.
Memphis has no hotel on either the TripAdvisor or U.S. News list, though the Peabody, the original, is a Forbes four star.
How about Atlanta? It scores in U.S. News with the St. Regis at 38th, the Four Seasons at 45th, and the Ritz-Carlton, Buckhead (Atlanta) at No. 89.
I once lived in a budget downtown Atlanta hotel for two months while making a job change. One day as I strolled downtown - trying to keep straight all the streets with Peachtree as part or all of the name (there were about two dozen in those days) - I stepped into the Ritz-Carlton. I knew right away I wasn’t dressed appropriately and made a quick exit.
Enough of comparables, as they say in real estate.
TripAdvisor rates the 92-story monument to Donald Trump’s ego, the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago, at No. 12, only three rungs above the four-story Capital.
Go figure this: The U.S. News list has the Trump International at 129. That’s 72 steps below the Capital.
Of course, one thing that can be argued of these lists is that they’re bunkum.
But who doesn’t love a good list debate on your favorite subject? Baseball players, for instance.
If you have a tip, call Jack Weatherly at (501) 378-3518 or e-mail him at
Business, Pages 65 on 02/10/2013