CALL YOUR CONGRESSMAN? This Montecito hotel is charging rates so high they should probably be outlawed
The California Travel and Tourism Commission ought to be made aware of price gouging along our coast (so call 'em, at 916-322-1266)
SANTA BARBARA, CALIF. — My hometown!
But let’s start with this gold nugget, actually:
Yeah: at rates like that there won’t be any checking in by us at the Rosewood Miramar Beach® hotel in Montecito, a town we grew up in/around and that the odious Meghan sorry-hon-you’re-not-a-princess-here-Markle seems to have cast a “nasty”, as President Trump might say, spell on — at least, if you look at the inchoate yet pernicious effect she’s had on the place.
…like, you wouldn’t want to be her neighbor now, would you? But not to digress, let’s pass from annoyance to where it’s really at these days: outrage.
Back in the old days, there was one nice place to stay next to the beach in Montecito, and that was the Biltmore. I imagine that a nice room a decade or so back would set you back a few hundred bucks a night: worth the splurge, because it was always Santa Barbara’s prestige spot (along with the San Ysidro Ranch, of course). I use Santa Barbara and Montecito interchangeably here, because in effect the latter is just the ritzy oaky corner of the former.
Speaking of the Ritz, Rosewood Hotels ain’t the Ritz, though they have the pretensions to be. How a hotel that from the outside looks like a sort of brand new Motel 6 (hey, don’t mock the 6) and on the inside isn’t all that impressive has the unmitigated chutzpah to charge something north of $6,000 for one night for a “Beach” room or even suite escapes us, but it sounds like something the California Travel and Tourism Commission ought to be “checking out” for themselves because hotel operators do NOT operate in a vaccuum where they set all the rules. Sometimes they need to play by them.
To native Californians prices like that are not only ridiculous and laughable but also an insult. No hotel has the right to charge that kind of money — not in this country anyway, where the free market does not mean a free for all.
Rosewood Resorts started out in 1979 with The Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas — a city that is part of a state that is frankly an embarrassment to the entire country right now — and is currently owned by some company based in…Hong Kong?? So does that mean Communists are charging these kind of insane prices? Maybe.
Aren’t we supposed to be watching out for Chinese domination of this and that? Whatever, right? “This is California, chillout dude.”
But, no. We are living in a time when American families can’t afford a fucking meal for two at McDonalds, when “miraculous” AI is lining the pockets of corporate sharks through illegal price fixing and complicit media like “Travel + Leisure” and programs like Eugene Levy’s “Reluctant Traveler” work overtime to normalize inexplicably stratospheric hotel rates at places like the batshit ugly Amangiri in Utah, an overwater luxe hut in the Maldives or, uh, this extravagantly unremarkable pile of clapboard right here in our backyards.
How did they even get a permit to build a hotel so close to the beach in Montecito? Was our California Coastal Commission taking a collective ganja break? Seriously, what the fuck-a-toodle is going on here? Return our coast!
End of graffiti. Next comes the real complaint.
Stay tuned.
Your observations on the soaring hotel rates in luxury hotels, whether in Montecito
( Santa Barbara, California ) or elsewhere on 'the map' are making headlines.
Whether or not these out of control rates will continue to increase is the question.