The 10 Best Luxury Hotels In Hong Kong

The Peninsula Hong Kong Lobby

Hong Kong is a cosmopolitan metropolis, a wealthy global financial center, and a culturally-rich historic city filled with modern skyscrapers, high-end shops, phenomenal restaurants, and luxury hotels.

The bar is set high in this prosperous city, where service is nothing less than stellar and the utmost finest is the norm. This means that hotels have to compete to stay at the top, with constant renovations, high-end amenities, and superb service.

Our friends at Oyster.com helped us come up with a list of the best luxury hotels in Hong Kong. Book one to bask in true luxury.

The Langham Hong Kong

8 Peking Road, Hong Kong

Rooms starting at $240

This beautiful European-style hotel is ideally located for shopping fanatics--it's close to designer stores like Fendi and Louis Vuitton and it's near the Langham Place Shopping Mall.

It offers all the luxe amenities to suit the tastes of the high-end fashionistas who stay here, from the Michelin-starred restaurant to the ornate lobby with its high gilded ceilings and sparkling chandeliers, to the well-appointed guest rooms which have iPod docks, flatscreen TVs, Wi-Fi, and more.

The Luxe Manor

39 Kimberley Road Tsim Sha Tsui Kowloon, Hong Kong

Rooms starting at $150

The Luxe Manor could have come out of the mind of Salvador Dali. The design of this eclectic boutique hotel is surreal, if a bit busy and over-the-top.

The lobby is decorated in bold colors, there's a lip-shaped sofa in the bar, and the ornate rooms have details such as animal-print carpets, surreal asymmetrical furniture, and whimsical prints decorating the walls and pillows. This is a one-of-a-kind hotel in a great location in the downtown commercial area.

W Hong Kong

1 Austin Road West, Hong Kong

Rooms starting at $280

As expected for the W hotel chain, the W Hong Kong is sleek, trendy, and modern, with funky decor, bright-colored lighting, and buzzy pop art, but this W feels a bit more luxurious than some of its counterparts.

The Bliss spa is gorgeous with teak tubs and soft lighting, the stunning rooftop infinity pool on the 76th floor offers dizzying views, and the guest rooms sport high-tech amenities and slate bathrooms. It's not traditional or subdued, but it's still luxurious in its own right.

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These Isolated Guatemalan Mountain Towns Didn't Even Appear On Official Maps Until 1996

ixil triangle

The Ixil Triangle, named for the shape made by the three towns in the region, is one of the most visually stunning parts of Guatemala.

It's also one of the most tragic.

During the 36-year-long Guatemalan Civil War, which lasted until 1996, guerrilla warriors used the mountainous region as a base of operations and the Guatemalan Army responded with a scorched-earth policy to destroy nearby villages.

Thousands of people in the indigenous Ixil community were tortured and killed. And the towns that make up the Ixil Triangle, Santa Maria Nebaj and two others, were literally erased from the country's official maps until the end of the war.

The Ixil people continue to live in the region today in relative isolation; they don't speak Spanish, have little access to technology, and are suspicious of outsiders.

Eric Goldschein, a reporter (and former Business Insider intern) spent two days trekking through the region with a guide. He shared some photos and his story with us.

Have an amazing travel story and photos to share? Send an email to thelife@businessinsider.com and we could feature your adventure next.

The Ixil Triangle is defined by three municipalities in the Cuchumatanes mountains: Santa Maria Nebaj, San Gaspar Chajul, and San Juan Cotzal.

Eric's trip began at Lake Atitlan, an eight-hour drive from the closest Ixil town of Nebaj.

Eric met Nicholas, his guide, in the town of Nebaj.

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Selecting a Card Processing Terminal: Features of Credit Card Processing Machines

A card processing final is a instrument utilized to gather payment with the time of sale, no matter whether it truly is by swiping, key entering, or online. The expectation for retailers to accept the two electronic credit card and debit installments is completely ingrained while in the minds of individuals around the world. Retailers [...]

Source: http://www.legaldebthelponline.com/2012/05/30/selecting-a-card-processing-terminal-features-of-credit-card-processing-machines/

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Morgan Stanley Increases Stake In MSSB By 14% (MS)

Via Bloomberg's Rick Green:

Morgan Stanley plans to buy an additional 14 percent stake in the Morgan Stanley Smith Barney Holdings LLC brokerage from Citigroup Inc.

The purchase price will be determined over a 90-day period, according to a statement today from New York-based Morgan Stanley, which currently owns 51 percent.

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Unsecured Loan Debt Consolidation Get Rid Of Sleepless Nights

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New Orleans Hornets Beat Odds And Win NBA Draft Lottery

With just a 13.7% chance of winning the NBA Draft Lottery, the New Orleans Hornets overcame the odds and won the first pick in the NBA Draft and the right to select Kentucky's Anthony Davis.

With the Hornets winning the first pick, the Charlotte Bobcats will pick second, and became the latest team to finish with the worst record and fail to receive the top pick in the draft. The 2004 Orlando Magic were the last team to finish with the worst record and win the draft lottery. And in 28 seasons, the team with the worst record has only won four times.

The Hornets had the fourth longest odds to win the lottery.

Here are the top three picks being revealed on ESPN (via TheBigLead.com)...

 

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Where's the Beef, Facebook?

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Perhaps one of the best advertising campaigns of all time was the "Where's the Beef?" series from Wendy's in the mid-'80s. While appealing to little old ladies and their ravenous appetite for large, juicy hamburgers was likely enough to justify running the commercial back then, advertisers have evolved over the years to require increasingly measurable performance metrics from campaigns. In other words, arithmetic on Madison Avenue no longer means splitting up the martini tab at lunch, but instead involves robust return-on-investment analysis.

Which brings me to General Motors' (NYSE: GM  ) recent announcement that it's pulling paid campaigns from Facebook (Nasdaq: FB  ) and focusing resources on the social network's free business pages. With billions set aside for ad spending each year, GM is one of the largest advertisers in the United States. Does this move from a big spender speak to fundamental weaknesses with Facebook's ad performance, or was this an isolated event, as recent news suggests it might be? While much has been written about the concerning trend that Facebook users are migrating toward its mobile app, a platform with which it has yet to monetize at all, the structural issue of ad performance concerns me more.

Online Ads 101
The most successful online advertising company is unquestionably search leader Google (Nasdaq: GOOG  ) , so I set out to compare the attributes of the incumbent powerhouse with the burgeoning newbie and stumbled upon a report card published by search marketing services provider Wordstream. The comparison details a number of the key differences between Facebook and search Google across a number of categories. While both platforms booked A's in elective subjects like "Advertising Reach" and "Growth," there were some disparities between the two when looking at the more technical subjects of Ad Targeting, Formats, and Performance. Let's dive a bit deeper into the grades Wordstream doled out for each.

Targeting
Google: B
Facebook: C

In this subject Facebook falls well short of Google, lacking the ability to target mobile users, syndicate ads on other sites, or address consumer intent in the way keyword ads can. In fact, Facebook boasts only one unique targeting option relative to Big G -- the ability to target users based on profile data such as work, education, and other interests.

Formats
Google: A
Facebook: D+

Recent news suggests that GM's move was done in response to Facebook's denial of a large page takeover it requested. The denial stemmed from Facebook's intense focus on creating an uncluttered user experience, which comes at the expense of format options for brand advertisers like GM. It also speaks to a bigger problem for Facebook -- a sole reliance on one platform to deliver ads for customers. Google, on the other hand, has diversified away from a text-only shop to offer display, video, and mobile gaming advertisements. The main Google search page alone doesn't lend itself to these alternative formats, which is where moves to expand its reach through the AdSense network, YouTube, and Android operating system prove their worth.

Performance
Google: A
Facebook: B+

Perhaps Wordstream was grading on some sort of curve here, with the remainder of the class consisting of defunct Yellow Pages publishers, because the data suggests a much wider gap in performance than these grades suggest. One stat that stood out as particularly shocking related to click-through rates, or a users' propensity to click on an ad they are exposed to. Here, ads on Google's main search page boasted click-through rates 100 times that of Facebook display ads. On a more apples-to-apples basis, Google's display ads performed 10 times better based on click-through rates. In spite of this disparity in performance, rates on the social network rose by 40% in the first quarter while click-through rates declined 8%, which can't do much for that ROI calculation.

Foolish takeaway
While I understand this report card is one firm's assessment and is subject to some inherent biases, it doesn't change my belief that there are fundamental flaws with Facebook ads as they exist today. Users of Facebook are primarily there to consume social information, as evidenced by the company's mission "to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected" and confirmed by the extremely low click-through rates of its ads.

On the other hand, Google's mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" speaks to a more broad application to all information anyone would ever want to find. As advertisers look to further their commercial interests, the latter appears to offer the correct alignment of users' need for information and advertisers' need for return on investment. The lofty budgets being allocated toward Google search from the likes of Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN  ) and AT&T (NYSE: T  ) , both of which are spending more than $40 million a year on paid search, show that Google is providing that ROI for the big spenders. Now its Facebook's turn to do the same.

The negative sentiment surrounding Facebook is palpable, and at this point I'm not convinced it's overdone. Facebook has a lot to prove as a public company, but if you're looking for an online leader that's already proving itself, this company is a fraction of Facebook's size but boasts some revenue weapons the social-networking juggernaut probably wishes it had. Find out more about this company in our special report: "Forget Facebook -- Here's the Tech IPO You Should Be Buying." Pick up your free copy today.

The Steve Jobs Betrayal
You may already know that in the final year of his life, Jobs revealed a stunning betrayal ? and told his biographer, "I will spend my last dying breath... and every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank to right this wrong." What was it that made Jobs so irate ? and why could it make a few in-the-know investors some major profits over the coming months and years?

Enter your email address below to find out what made Jobs so enraged!

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Source: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/05/30/wheres-the-beef-facebook.aspx

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