Hotel boom has L.A. in lap of luxury

County has seven five-star lodgings on Forbes list, with most added since recession.

At the newest five-star hotel around Los Angeles, a massive bronze chandelier hangs from its nearly threestory Art Deco lobby, suffused with the scent of freshcut roses.

Upstairs, each room is fitted with floor-to-ceiling windows that open to balconies with views of Santa Monica Bay on one side and the Hollywood sign on the other.

Each guest is pampered too, assigned a personal concierge to pick up dry cleaning, book dinner reservations and snag tickets to the Dodgers or, if preferred, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.

Welcome to the five-star Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills, a $200-million hotel that opened last year amid a worldwide boom of high-end hospitality construction that has benefited Los Angeles.

During the Great Recession, developers put a hold on such ultra-luxury hotels, opting instead to build budget inns or overhaul midscale lodgings. But now that the economy is thriving and travel demand is at record levels, luxury is back.

“L.A. is becoming the place to be again,” said hotelier Beny Alagem, who built the 12-story Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills and owns the neighboring fourstar Beverly Hilton Hotel. “People like the atmosphere that we created. They like the weather.”

Such talk could be written off as a typical developer boast, but a recent survey by Forbes Travel Guide, which awards the hotel ratings, found that with the addition of the Waldorf Astoria, Los Angeles County is now home to seven five-star hotels, second in the nation only to New York.

The county has added four of those hotels to the list since the recession, including the Montage Beverly Hills in 2010, the refurbished Hotel Bel-Air in 2013 and the Four Seasons Hotel Los Angeles at Beverly Hills in 2014.

That doesn’t include several four-star and other luxury hotels, such as the SLS Beverly Hills in 2008 and the Ritz-Carlton Los Angeles and the JW Marriott, which both opened in 2010 near the L.A. Live entertainment district.

Worldwide, Los Angeles County now ranks sixth in the number of five-star lodgings, behind Macau (12), New York (11), Paris (10), London (nine) and Hong Kong (eight).

“To have Los Angeles at that kind of level speaks volumes about where Los Angeles has come to,” said Alan X. Reay, president of Atlas