"How can you ask for 20x EBITDA valuation, when I could only get 5x EBITDA for my investment in a hotel?" Although it seemed rather obvious – hotels have lower margins, higher fixed costs, limited scalability with any expansion requiring high capital costs – the software model just wasn't an intuitive recipe for his investment cook book.
So it's obvious that hotel lobbies and cafes have free wi-fi, how about Best Buy? Whole Foods?
But the emirate's wide-ranging development plan is paving the way for something more long-lasting, with investment in energy, technology and even intellectual capital symbolized by the opening of satellite campuses for New York University and Paris' Sorbonne quietly balancing out the more obvious big hotels and golf courses.
One way to tell you were in this town, should you ever forget where you were, should you ever go mad and begin not to recognize the obvious scenery, the hotels, the choppy water, the cheap tea rooms, pie and pea restaurants, fish and chip kiosks, the amusement arcades, and the dancehalls on the piers, one way to verify your location was to watch the way visitors breathed.
OK, again with the obvious, but many hotels have fabulous built-in bars: In other words, you need not drive.
Dorm beds from £17 per night, twins from £35, rooms for four/six from £59/£84, self-catering, shepherd's huts sleep two or three for £42/£54 a night, woolerhostel.co.uk Limehouse – in gritty east London – may not be the most obvious setting for a hotel with a large, leafy garden, elaborately corniced meeting rooms and 40 modern bedrooms but this isn't like most hotels.
This arrangement has obvious benefits for large hotel chains; by outsourcing the work, they don't have to worry about offering a living wage, health care coverage or other benefits to the housekeepers who clean their hotels.
It seems like the best advice that a political consultant could offer now is obvious: forget the fancy hotels, the corporate jets, the spacious mansions and, oh yes, the private islands.
Surrounded by 500-year-old fortress walls, the Centro Historico is a Unesco World Heritage Site, with Spanish colonial architecture, internationally branded luxury hotels and obvious traveller appeal.
The obvious first question at the hotel on Washington Street was whether there were video cameras.
