Drop a one-dollar coin from the top floor of the Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong, and a guest can head to his well-appointed bathroom and brush his teeth before that piece of metal hits the ground -- and hopefully it hits landscape or pavement, not some hapless human.
Whether that fun fact constitutes a draw for luxury travelers is open to debate.
Much as the U.S. joined the space race after the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, hoteliers appear to be participating in their own race to the sky.
The most recent entrant is the JW Marriott Marquis Dubai, a 1,608-room hotel slated to open by the end of the year. It boasts 72 floors and tops out at 1,164 feet, making it, Marriott International claims, the world's tallest hotel-only building.
Which means that its upper-floor guests would theoretically be able to peer down on guests at Jumeirah's Burj Al Arab, the iconic sail-shaped structure that bills itself as the world's only "seven-star" hotel. Opened in 1999, it is situated about eight miles southeast of the JW Marriott Marquis Dubai, but more importantly, it's about 100 feet shorter than the JW.
Either way, both hotels are relative pipsqueaks compared with Hong Kong's Ritz-Carlton, which opened last spring. Though that hotel doesn't qualify as the world's tallest because it's part of the city's International Commerce Centre, its 312 rooms take up the 1,587-foot-tall building's 102nd through -- gulp! -- 118th floors, making the hotel the world's "highest."
And, for you science geeks out there, that coin, accelerating at 32 feet per second squared, would travel almost a third of a mile in about 54 seconds before it hit the ground. Or someone's skull.
For hotel developers and management companies, really tall hotels offer builders an opportunity to maximize cash flow from progressively more expensive real estate in some of the world's most densely populated cities, while simultaneously offering a key differentiator within an increasingly crowded luxury-hotel market.
The world's total number of inter-country tourists, many of whom are luxury travelers, rose 6.6%, to 940 million arrivals, in 2010, the most recent year tracked by the United Nations World Tourism Organization.
Meanwhile, according to Smith Travel Research, about a third of the world's hotel-development pipeline is in the Asia-Pacific region, while demand for destinations like Dubai and Abu Dhabi is on the rise as travelers stay away from less politically stable regions of the Middle East and North Africa.
That means hoteliers are looking for new ways to pitch their properties, some of which don't just involve sheer height. Last December, Hyatt Hotels celebrated the opening of the Hyatt Capital Gate Abu Dhabi. This 189-room hotel takes up the top 16 floors of a 33-story building that leans at an 18-degree angle, which is about four times the tilt of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The hotel even features an Eastern Mediterranean restaurant called -- you guessed it -- 18°.
And last month, Hyatt said it plans to debut its Park Hyatt brand in Thailand when the Park Hyatt Bangkok opens in 2014. The 222-room hotel will be housed in a building shaped like a coil twisting into the sky.
All of which begs the question: Do most people want to book rooms at dizzying heights?
"Clearly, when you are in a high-density area, there is justification or at least some rationale," said Rick Swig, president of hotel consultant RSBA & Associates. "Alternatively, it might be considered a game of who has the biggest toy. But there are many customers who would rather be on lower floors than higher floors. There are just these not-fully-researched assumptions that customers want to be at the top of a building."
Granted, such a phenomenon does not appear to have reached the U.S., where new hotel development came to a virtual standstill in recent years because of the Great Recession. The tallest U.S. hotel-only building is the 73-story Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center, which was built in 1977.
Meanwhile, the tallest U.S. building that houses a hotel is the 92-story Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago. But, as is often the case with The Donald, there's a catch: The hotel portion of the building actually tops out at the 27th floor, with luxury condos getting top-floor billing.
Still, some U.S. developers are reaching for the sky more out of necessity than as a marketing gimmick as hoteliers increasingly look to broaden their range of nonluxury hotels in urban locations. Last year, Marriott reached an agreement for a 378-room Courtyard by Marriott and a 261-room Residence Inn to be developed in a midtown Manhattan building that will top out at 68 stories, when it opens in 2013. That height will make it New York's tallest hotel-only structure.
Whether these lofty hotels will be judged on their stature or their service-oriented merits remains to be seen. A TripAdvisor reviewer of the Hyatt Capital Gate Abu Dhabi remarked that the second bank of elevators required by the building's tilting structure made getting to the hotel room "complicated." And a number of Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong guests wrote on TripAdvisor that their views of the city below were either obstructed or eliminated because the top floors were shrouded in fog.
Still, the hotel generally received high marks for its service, and even the weather provides some pleasant surprises for those willing to make the trip up, one reviewer reported in February.
"On a cloudy day, you can wake up in an impenetrable murk," the reviewer wrote in a Feb. 16 post. "Then the clouds clear and you get a beautiful view of Hong Kong or Kowloon and the sea."
Contact Danny King at [email protected], and follow him on Twitter @dktravelweekly.