The hotels have been busy throughout the winter, and the war seems to have made little difference.
This season, the most expensive hotels in San Juan – the Ritz Carlton, the Caribe Hilton, the Wyndham El San Juan – are racking up nearly full houses (85 percent to 90 percent occupancy) at rates that start at around $225 a night and go through the roof. What makes the difference is Old San Juan.Įvery day, cruise ships and airlines bring thousands of travelers (at least four million annually), filling hotels in the metropolitan area and resorts throughout the island. And it's not only the new resorts and the ever-grander casinos. Duff stayed, or the dashing style of the Water Club, where Derek Jeter was spotted hanging out at the bar this past Thanksgiving weekend, that has savvy travelers looking at San Juan with new eyes. It gave me a totally different feeling about the place."īut it's not just the energized social scene at the Caribe Hilton, where Mr. This time, I stayed at a fabulous hotel and I spent more time with people who knew the city, who guided me better and took me to the best places, especially Old San Juan. It seemed too American, too many fast-food joints, but I was doing it on the cheap, staying far out, near the airport. "The first time," he said, "I didn't get the greatest feeling. Duff, who lives in New York, visited San Juan some six years ago and came away disappointed. I go to Miami Beach all the time, but now I'm building Puerto Rico into my travel schedule." "Those are the surprises that make me want to return. "It's the atmosphere, the history, the new restaurants," said Martyn Duff, 42, a British hair stylist who is the regional creative director for Vidal Sassoon in North America. In the last few years, this cordon of glitz has made San Juan the premier playground of the West Indies. Starting in Old San Juan – the 500-year-old Spanish colonial area that is the cultural capital of the Caribbean – a strand of hotels, high-rise condominiums, casinos and dance halls runs east toward El Condado, a residential and tourist haven, and Isla Verde, near the airport. The jet skis that noisily crisscross the water all day are finally still, the beach chairs are folded and stacked away, the vendors are gone, and, from a rooftop nearby, the beach seems untouched, placid, silent.īut there is no quiet here at Wet, the rooftop bar in one of San Juan's splashiest hotels, the Water Club, a novelty among the scores of nightclubs, cocktail lounges, restaurants and discos that are making San Juan the new South Beach – a South Beach with five-century-old architecture and 21st-century resorts, Caribbean breezes and long stretches of powder-soft beaches shaded by native coconut palm trees. The beach girls have retired to wash off the sand and put on the flimsiest skirts to show off newly bronzed legs. – THE night sky darkens slowly and the sea flattens, with only the gentlest waves breaking on the shore, the sea and the sky becoming one, the line between the two blurred, gone. I had to break this post up into 2 parts. I cant find the link, but Im pretty sure it was written about 3-6 months ago.
I thought this was an interesting and informative article on San Juan.