PRESS RELEASE – 21c Museum Hotel was named the #1 Hotel in the South by the readers of Condé Nast Traveler magazine in the 2012 Condé Nast Traveler Readers’ Choice Awards featured in the November issue and on CondeNastTraveler.com. 21c tops a list of 50 hotels in the South, which also includes Blackberry Farm in Tennessee, St. Regis Atlanta and Planters Inn located in Charleston. 21c also ranked #22 in the world, and is one of only five U.S. hotels to appear in the top 25, competing against brands such as Taj and Four Seasons. This year nearly 50,000 individuals participated in the voting, almost doubling last year’s number of 26,000 participants. Readers selected a total of 1,306 winners, prompting the magazine to break the results down by region. Rankings are based on the quality of rooms, service, food and dining, location and overall design. 21c has earned top honors in the survey five years running.
“We are humbled that travelers from around the world continue to embrace the experience of 21c,” said Steve Wilson, Founder and CEO of 21c Museum Hotels. “We are thrilled to be included in this peer group, but I am most proud of the high standards that the team here in Louisville continues to achieve. It would have been easy to be complacent when we were chosen the number one hotel the first time, but our team continues to push themselves not only to provide the best hotel experience, but to share cutting edge contemporary art with our guests. We look forward to bringing 21c to even more travelers as we prepare to open our new hotels in Cincinnati and Bentonville.”
About the Readers’ Choice Awards
Methodology: The Condé Nast Traveler Readers’ Choice Survey, begun in 1988, is available through a secure Web site at condenasttraveler.com/vote. This year’s tabulations of 46,476 responses were done by Global Market Insite, Inc., of Boston. Organization: The questionnaire contains lists of candidates in various categories (Cities, Hotels, etc.). Individual candidates are judged by relevant criteria for each. Those that receive a required minimum number of responses are deemed eligible for a Readers’ Choice Award. Evaluation: Each candidate is rated, criterion by criterion, on a five-point scale: excellent, very good, good, fair, and poor. Those scores, which represent the percentage of excellent and very good ratings, are averaged to calculate the final score published here. For example, King Pacific Lodge’s rating, 96.9 is the average of its scores for all criteria: Food/Dining, Location, Overall Design, Rooms, Service, and (for resorts) Activities/Facilities. For more information visit www.condenasttraveler.com/rca.
About 21c Museum Hotel
21c Museum Hotel was founded in Louisville, Kentucky in 2006 by preservationists and contemporary art collectors Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson. Brown and Wilson had a vision of bringing art into people’s daily lives and helping to ease suburban sprawl by supporting the revitalization of downtown Louisville. Thus, 21c was born. Housed in a series of renovated 19th century tobacco and Bourbon warehouses, 21c combines a contemporary art museum, 90 room boutique hotel and award-winning restaurant Proof on Main. The main focal point of the property is the 9,000 square foot contemporary art museum. As North America’s first museum devoted solely to art of the 21st century, 21c Museum seeks to share new art with new audiences, featuring a rotating program of thought-provoking solo and group exhibitions that reflect the global nature of art today, as well as site-specific, commissioned installations. But art is not confined to the museum alone; works of the 21st century are featured throughout the hotel and restaurant. 21c has garnered praise from many notable publications including Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Geographic Traveler, and W. With the success of the Louisville property and with strong local partners who share the belief that art can be an economic driver for a community, 21c is expanding outside of Louisville. 21c Museum Hotels, a growing company that oversees the development and management of 21c nationally, was formed in 2007. Hotels are under construction in Cincinnati, OH (opening the fourth quarter of 2012) and Bentonville, AR (opening the first quarter of 2013), and projects in Lexington, KY and Durham, NC have been announced.
For further information:
Stephanie Greene
21c Museum Hotels
502.882.6231
sgreene@21cHotels.com
