New York's TWA Hotel Has a New Way of Luring Guests: Roller-Skating at JFK Airport

Like many hoteliers, Tyler Morse has taken pains to make sure his property furnishes the sort of amenities that upmarket travelers are looking for. He’s got restaurants and cocktail lounges, a rooftop pool and a 10,000-square-foot fitness center. But as the travel and tourism industry claws its way out of the pandemic doldrums, an innkeeper these days needs every amenity he can find. And that’s why, last week, Morse began to offer something unusual in the world of four-star hotels: outdoor roller-skating. And on an active airport tarmac, no less. Granted, Morse is in a unique position to offer this sort of thing. His company, MCR, operates New York’s TWA Hotel, a 512-room jet-age lodge installed in the TWA Flight Center, the futuristic 1963 terminal designed by Eero Saarinen. Nestled between the traffic loop and JetBlue’s Terminal 5 at the John F. Kennedy International Airport, the landmark building enjoys a private slice of tarmac. Amenities like the rooftop pool help to draw "staycationers" to the property. Shortly after the property opened in 2019, MCR parked a Lockheed Constellation on part of that tarmac and opened the old prop plane as the Connie Cocktail Lounge. And when it came to an otherwise unused stretch of concrete in the shadow of Connie’s starboard engines? Many operators would have stuck some planters there. Morse looked at it and saw Roll-A-Rama. “We had 125 people skate on Saturday, and we were very happy with that,” the CEO told Adweek, describing the many views his skating rink offers that few (indeed any) others do. “You’re looking at the control tower. You’re watching planes—you can see them take off on Runway 4 Left. You’re underneath the wing of the Constellation plane and you’re looking at the magnificent Saarinen building,” he said. Management put down 2,668 tiles to create a skate-friendly surface. For a 50-minute session, the TWA Hotel charges $20 for adults and $16 for kids, skate rental included. But Morse is adamant that roller-skating is not a revenue source for his hotel, which cost a cool $265 million to build and barely enjoyed a year of routine business before the Covid-19 touched down in New York. For this property, Roll-A-Rama is simply good destination marketing. “It's not about revenue—it's about activation,” Morse said. “It's about there being a lot of things for people to do here.” The historic fuselage is now the Connie Cocktail Lounge, complete with themed drinks. He rattles off a partial list of diversions that await guests at the hotel, including the Sunken Lounge (a red-carpeted retreat that serves up $15 cocktails like the Control Tower Sour), the Paris Café (serving Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s take on classic TWA in-flight menus) and the Twister Room, a kids’ romp devoted to the 1964 Milton Bradley game. “The roller-skating rink was intended as another, you know, fun thing for people to do,” Morse said. In fact, entertaining diversions had been part of TWA’s strategy from the blueprint stages. Located 12 miles from Manhattan, the hotel was destined to do its bread-and-butter trade on business travelers willing to pay the rack rate of about $250 a night. As for the prospect of attracting locals, Morse knew that the citizens Brooklyn and Queens were hardly going to show up to watch a baggage carousel. Attractions were essential and, Morse says now, they have paid off. A landmarked terminal—now the hotel's lobby—lets guests stroll back to the 1960s. After a “brutal” stretch of 10% occupancy during the pandemic’s early months last year, Morse said, the hotel is now at 85% occupancy. (New York’s overall occupancy rate inched up to only 35% in April, according to hospitality analytics firm STR.) What's more, many of TWA’s guests are locals. “Travel is coming back,” Morse said. “You’d be shocked at how many people are dying to get out of their basements. We have a couple hundred rooms a day of people that live in the New York area [who] drive here, spend a couple of days, and then drive home.” Or skate home, as the case may be. A U.K. Grocery Store Is Letting You Get Awkwardly Festive by Shopping on Ice Skates