Southern Comfort

URUGUAY Southern Comfort

With a gala dinner dance attended by 300 members of Uruguay's most select society, the glittering new Victoria Plaza hotel opened for business in Montevideo this week. Designed for American tourists and businessmen, North or South, the 22-story, 400-room hotel is the fifth link in a $50 million Latin American hotel chain being put together by the Intercontinental Hotels Corp., a subsidiary of Pan American World Airways.

The guests found the Victoria Plaza equipped with every convenience the most demanding tourist could expect: airconditioning, the continent's fastest elevators (710 ft. a minute), bilingual telephonists and barbers, a Helena Rubinstein beauty parlor, bedsitting rooms furnished with thick English rugs and draperies, and running ice water. Pride & joy of Executive Chef "Lugot of the Waldorf" is the pushbutton kitchen, visible to bife-savoring patrons in all its stainless-steel sublimity through a long window that runs the entire width of the hotel's grill room. Pronouncing Uruguayan beef the equal of Argentina's finest, Chef Lugot undertakes to serve it any style, with any of 96 sauces.

Though the Victoria Plaza prices its garden penthouse suite at $36 a head, it is not intended to be another Waldorf or Copacabana Palace. With Statler-style "one-room suites" costing $7.50 a day and up, the new hotel is designed for the middle-income traveler who, I.H.C. officials think, will be their biggest customer in future. As such, it is only the newest unit in Pan Am's long-range plan for increasing tourist traffic from the U.S. by supplying better hotels for travelers. I.H.C. already manages hotels in Belem, Santiago and Barranquilla, owns and operates Mexico City's Reforma and will take over Bermuda's Princess Hotel on lease Jan. 1.

In cooperation with the U.S. Export-Import Bank and private interests in Latin American countries, I.H.C. also has an ambitious hotel-building program underway. Scheduled to open next fall, in time for the projected Inter-American Conference of Nations, is Caracas' $7,000,000, 400-room Tamanaco. Bogota's 400-room Tequendama and Maracaibo's 150-room Del Lago, opening later in the year, will finally give those cities first-class hotels ; and the 600-room Copan, due to be completed in 1954, will help fill the urgent need for more and better hotel accommodations in booming Sao Paulo.

As globe-girdling as Pan American itself, I.H.C. has also signed contracts for hotels in such other widely separated spots as Tokyo and Saudi Arabia. Though it had to start in the red, ambitious I.H.C. looks ahead a few years to a $100 million-a-year hotel business--a healthy sideline for a $188 million-a-year airline.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.