Rosen Hotels & Resorts Opens New Gary Sain Memorial Skybridge Connector to Orange County Convention Center

New Skybridge Connects Rosen Plaza® Hotel to Convention Center’s West Building

For more information, contact:
Robert Hubler
407-639-4212 , rhubler@RosenHotels.com

Photography available at Press gallery

Gary Sain Memorial Skybridge

(l to r) Visit Orlando President & CEO George Aguel, Rosen Plaza® General Manager Gary Hudson, Rosen Hotels & Resorts VP Sales & Marketing Leslie Menichini, I-Drive Chamber Executive Director Maria Triscari, Rosen Plaza® Director of Sales & Marketing Victoria Hall, Orange County Convention Center Deputy General Manager Jan Addison, Windermere Mayor Gary Bruhn, Orange County Commissioner Tiffany Russell Moore, Orange County Commissioner Scott Boyd, Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs, Pamela Sain and Rosen Hotels & Resorts Orlando President & COO Harris Rosen

ORLANDO (Sept. 19, 2013) – Rosen Hotels & Resorts celebrates the opening of the Gary Sain Memorial Skybridge, which now connects the Rosen Plaza® with the Orange County Convention Center (OCCC) West Building, with a ribbon cutting and dedication ceremony today at the hotel. The new skybridge completes the fourth and final link in connecting the OCCC with adjacent International Drive hotels.

Construction of the $2.5 million skybridge was funded entirely by Rosen Hotels & Resorts. Coming in well under its $3.2 million budget, the 745-foot connector was built in just over three months and will provide thousands of meetings attendees annually with a safe, weather-proof and traffic-free “commute” from their Rosen Plaza® guestrooms to the convention center.

In attendance at today’s ceremony were Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs, who proclaimed the day in honor of Gary Sain, as well as Visit Orlando President & CEO George Aguel and Harris Rosen, President and COO, Rosen Hotels & Resorts. They, along with other Orlando tourism industry leaders, cut a ribbon to officially open the skybridge named in honor of the previous Visit Orlando President & CEO who passed away in May 2012. Sain had led the region’s main tourism-marketing agency since 2007, bringing about reorganization, a new vision and a name change to what had for years been called the Orlando/Orange County Convention & Visitors Bureau, or Orlando CVB.

“It is with great honor and respect that we dedicate this skybridge to my friend and colleague Gary Sain,” said Rosen. “Gary worked tirelessly to build and strengthen this destination during his time with us. Rest assured, Gary’s legacy continues here today.”

“We’re excited to now offer this pedestrian skybridge from our hotel to the convention center for our meetings guests,” said Victoria Hall, Director of Sales & Marketing, Rosen Plaza®. “This is an incredible new benefit to meeting planners and important milestone in the Orlando meetings community now that all four major convention hotels are connected to the convention campus.”

The new skybridge comes on the heels of other recent improvements at Rosen Plaza®. In the past year, the hotel completed a floor-to-ceiling renovation of all 800 guest rooms. Sleeping areas were outfitted with new amenities including 32″ flat-screen TVs, mini-refrigerators and 17″ lap-top sized safes, as well as new granite-topped dressers and nightstands, and new bedding and curtains. Bathrooms were redesigned for a spa-like feel with tiled showers and tubs withmosaic glass tile accents and granite-topped vanities. The hotel’s 16 hospitality suites-the Executive, Plaza and new Junior suites-were redesigned to offer more flexible seating and updated for a crisp, contemporary feel. Carpet in all guestrooms, suites and hallways was replaced with the latest in eco-friendly technology. The hotel’s full-service and buffet restaurant, Café Matisse, received a fresh, new look and updates including new wall benches, booths and dining tables to offer more comfortable seating and more flexibility for large groups.

The 800-room Rosen Plaza® provides its guests with resort-style luxury in a world-class vacation destination. Guests at Rosen Plaza® will enjoy accommodations in a deluxe room with a variety of amenities such as the outdoor heated pool and whirlpool and the Fitness center featuring “Life Fitness” cardiovascular and exercise machines and a full-range of free weights. Four on-site restaurants include Jack’s Place, voted the number one restaurant on International Drive by Orlando Magazine, with casual fine dining. Café Matisse offers buffets as well as full breakfast, lunch and dinner menus. The Lite Bite is open 24 hours a day and serves deli sandwiches and snacks. For entertainment, live music is featured on Friday and Saturday nights in Backstage Nightclub & Sports Bar, International Drive’s original nightclub. The nightclub also features a live deejay on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, large dance floor, pool tables and dart boards, 50-inch LCD screen TVs throughout, free valet parking, VIP area, food menu and more.

The hotel is conveniently located on International Drive across the street from Pointe Orlando’s incredible dining and entertainment complex featuring a 20-screen IMAX® stadium-seating theatre and popular retailers. For an additional charge, guests may enjoy golf or spa treatments at Rosen Plaza®’s nearby sister properties, Rosen Shingle Creek® or Rosen Centre®. Rosen Plaza® guests also receive complimentary transportation to Shingle Creek Golf Club, The Spa at Shingle Creek and The Spa at Rosen Centre®, as well as scheduled complimentary transportation to and from Universal Orlando® Resort, Sea World Orlando® and Wet ‘n Wild Orlando.

Rosen Plaza® is only 15 minutes from the Orlando International Airport. For more information, visit www.rosenplaza.com.
Rosen Hotels & Resorts owns and manages a family of seven Orlando hotels including three award-winning convention hotels-Rosen Centre®, Rosen Plaza® and Rosen Shingle Creek®-and four leisure properties in the Orlando tourist corridor-Rosen Inn International, Rosen Inn at Pointe Orlando, Rosen Inn closest to Universal and Clarion Inn Lake Buena Vista. The three Rosen convention hotels offer the most guest rooms and combined meeting space and closest proximity to Orange County Convention Center of any other Orlando convention hotel group. For more information, visit www.rosenhotels.com.

About The Orange County Convention Center
Celebrating 30 years of success, the Orange County Convention Center is the second largest convention facility in America. Each year the OCCC attracts more than 200 events to the Central Florida area. As a result, roughly 1.4 million attendees contribute approximately $2.1 billion to the area’s economy each year. For more information about the Orange County Convention Center visit our Web site at www.occc.net.

SKYBRIDGE BY THE NUMBERS:

Total cost-$2.5 million (under budget)
Total length-745 feet
Total steel tonnage-177 tons
Total gallons of paint-645 gallons
Construction completed in just over three months (May 28-Sept. 6)
Connects the fourth and final surrounding International Drive hotel to the Orange County Convention Center.

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Rosen Hotels & Resorts Joins Nation in Supporting Green Initiatives with March 23 Earth Hour Events

For more information, contact:
Robert Hubler
407-639-4212 , rhubler@RosenHotels.com

ORLANDO (March 21, 2013) – While Rosen Hotels & Resorts® prides itself on practicing green initiatives 24 hours a day with little fanfare or promotion, the company will be highlighting one of those hours this Saturday during the national Earth Hour celebration to help educate hotel guests about the importance of living as eco-friendly as possible.

Earth Hour is a global environmental initiative in partnership with WWF (World Wildlife Fund) in which individuals, businesses, governments and communities are invited to turn out their lights for one hour from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. on Saturday March 23, 2013 to show their support for environmentally sustainable action.

The seven Orlando Rosen Hotels & Resorts® properties will be turning off all non-essential interior and exterior lighting to include the rose garden and fountains at Rosen Shingle Creek®, Rosen Centre® and Rosen Plaza®. In addition, special activities such as candlelit dinners and glow drinks for guests will be served in hotel restaurants.

Rosen Hotels & Resorts® and its seven Orlando hotels will be joining hundreds of millions of participants in more than 7,000 cities and towns, in 152 countries and territories, and across seven continents in showing support for the importance of sustainable action around the world.

“We don’t claim to be the first hotel group to implement a green meetings initiative, nor do we claim to be the experts, but we can say that we have been practicing conservation efforts for many years and continue to look for ways to reduce, reuse and recycle wherever possible,” said Harris Rosen, President & COO of Rosen Hotels & Resorts®.

Rosen Hotels & Resorts®’ three Orlando convention properties, the 800-room Rosen Plaza®, 1334-room Rosen Centre® and 1500-room Rosen Shingle Creek®, were each designated Two Palm Green Lodges in 2009 under the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP)’s Florida Green Lodging Program. Launched in March 2004, the Florida Green Lodging Program establishes environmental guidelines for hotels to conserve natural resources and prevent pollution.

Long before Florida’s Green Lodging program was established, Rosen Hotels & Resorts® has made efforts to be responsible stewards of the area’s resources. For example, each of the hotels offers guests the opportunity to use linens and towels more than once, and each has water-efficient toilets and washing machines. Outdoor lighting and back-of-house lighting is operated by sensors. Programmable thermostats, Energy-Star appliances and paper and newspaper recycling programs are among the many ways the hotels lessen their eco-footprint. Rosen Shingle Creek® goes as far as to convert used cooking oil into bio-fuel to operate its golf course maintenance equipment. A website www.rosengreenmeetings.com shows meeting planners the ways in which Rosen Hotels & Resorts® is already working to help the environment, provides 10 meeting planner tips for holding a greener meeting and offers numerous links to learning more about “going green.”

Rosen Hotels & Resorts® also offers its associates the opportunity to conserve resources by offering Lynx bus passes via a payroll deduction program, posts a directory of associates interested in carpooling and offers alternate work schedules of four 10-hour days in certain departments to help reduce gas costs.

These energy-saving programs are imperceptible to hotel guests, proving that upscale accommodations don’t have to waste resources such as water and energy, to provide a superior guest experience. “Guests may never notice the small changes we’ve made to help save our planet, but we do them because it’s simply the right thing to do,” said Rosen. “Those guests who do take note applaud our efforts because they, too, are socially responsible citizens who are concerned about the effects man has on his environment.”

Over the past 38 years, Rosen Hotels & Resorts® has grown from 256 to approximately 6,300 rooms, approximately six percent of the total guest rooms in Central Florida. Today, the Rosen family of hotels includes three award-winning meetings properties — Rosen Shingle Creek®, Rosen Centre® and Rosen Plaza® — and four leisure properties — Quality Inn International, Rosen Inn at Pointe Orlando, Rosen Inn closest to Universal and Clarion Inn Lake Buena Vista. All seven Rosen Hotels are located in the Orlando tourism corridor and remain committed to providing outstanding value for all guests. For more information, visit www.rosenhotels.com or call 866-33-ROSEN.

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Harris Rosen: Hotelier, Humanitarian & Hospitality Legend

Harris Rosen, founder and president of the award-winning Rosen Hotels & Resorts®, isn’t a man who thinks much about his legacy. He is too busy for that. Rosen’s time is spent envisioning new ways to help the less fortunate here in Central Florida and around the world. He is actively ensuring that the next generation of hospitality professionals takes the industry to even greater heights. At the same time, he’s busy launching the most dynamic vacation and convention hotel to open in Central Florida in years—Rosen Shingle Creek®. In truth, this new property is more than just another hotel for Rosen; it is the crowning achievement of his four distinguished decades in the hospitality industry. Just as important, it is the fulfillment of a personal dream.

“I have spent the best years of my career here in Florida,” Rosen explained. “I love every aspect of this state—the geography, the history, the people. So, for my final project, I envisioned a hotel that honored the majesty of the natural Florida frontier and reflected the spirit of the grand hotels built here at the turn of century.”

Rosen purchased this parcel of 250 glorious acres along the legendary Shingle Creek several years ago. Flourishing with native flowers and plants—including dense oaks, towering pines and majestic cypress trees—this site, Rosen felt, embodied Florida’s natural magnificence. And he knew that it would be the ideal setting for the final project in his illustrious career.

That career began in 1961 when Rosen graduated from the prestigious School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University. But Rosen’s path to success began at a much earlier age.

“My first job was selling worms,” Rosen explained. “I was 8 or 9 years old, staying at a cabin in upstate New York during the summer while my father worked in the city. After a few days up there, I realized that the fishermen were anxious to fish, but didn’t want to bother with finding their own bait. So, I started catching night crawlers and selling them—three worms for a quarter. That was a lot of money back then.”

That worm business was perhaps the first glimpse of Rosen’s entrepreneurial spirit. But it wouldn’t be the last.

After college, Rosen went into the Army for three and a half years and was stationed overseas in Asia and Europe. While in Germany, Rosen was once again bitten by the business bug and found an opportunity to start a tulip business. Once again, he was a success. In fact, he earned enough money selling flowers to do a little traveling while on R & R, and it was on one of these trips that he stumbled onto his next entrepreneurial adventure.

On the beaches of Spain, Rosen began selling sun reflectors to the German tourists. He manufactured the reflectors himself and even sold advertising on the backs to makers of sunscreen. Before he headed back to his unit, Rosen had sold out of his inventory.

To Rosen, these ventures felt perfectly natural. Everything he attempted, he approached with incredible energy. And when he returned from his service, Rosen rededicated himself to the hospitality industry. He went to work with the Hilton Hotel Corporation and worked his way up to senior management, and then went into management with the Disney Company in California.

When Rosen migrated to Central Florida in the early seventies, he was ready to reclaim his entrepreneurial spirit, only this time, it wasn’t a worm business he was interested in.

In 1973, Rosen purchased a 256-room Quality Inn in Orlando on International Drive, and his company was officially underway. In Florida, Rosen was determined to set his roots, and raise the bar for the entire hotel industry. He was also excited to be a part of something bigger. He wanted to immerse himself in the community as well as his business.

Rosen recollects, “Where I grew up, in New York City’s Lower East Side, people didn’t have a lot of money. Everywhere I looked, I saw blue-collar workers. But my mom wanted more from me. I remember her saying constantly, ‘I don’t care what you are, just be the best.’” That advice pretty well sums up Rosen’s work ethic—whether he’s working on a new hotel like Rosen Shingle Creek or on one of his philanthropic endeavors, he is headstrong and totally committed. “I know that I’ve come a long way, but I don’t feel wealthy or successful. I think it’s just my Lower East Side background. I just work hard, like my mom told me to do.”

Over the course of the last thirty years, Rosen’s company has grown from 256 rooms to more than 6,300. Today, the Rosen family of hotels, which includes the award-winning Rosen Centre® and Rosen Plaza®, and four other properties in the Orlando area, remains, unwaveringly, a standard-bearer of service, reflecting the influence of Rosen’s early positions at the Waldorf Astoria and others.

“The secret of success is no secret,” Rosen says. “You’ve got to work your ass off. You have to be obsessed.”

While the company’s newest property, the Rosen Shingle Creek, may be the pinnacle of Rosen’s hospitality career, his legacy extends well beyond guest rooms and golf courses. To people in the hospitality community, as well as the community at large, Rosen is just as renowned and even more revered for his philanthropy and good will.

Throughout his career, Rosen has believed that his mission is not just to conduct business in the community, but also to invest in it. Toward that end, in 1993, he launched the Tangelo Park Pilot Program with the mission of fulfilling the dreams of at-risk children and their parents.

“My pledge was that every two, three and four-year-old would be able to go to preschool at no expense to their parents,” Rosen explained, “and that for every youngster in the program who was accepted to a public college in the state of Florida, we would pay his or her tuition, room, board, books and travel.”

Since its inception, the Tangelo Park program has provided more than 200 college scholarships, and high school dropout rates have gone from 25% in 1993 to just 6% in 2004.

Rosen has also donated more than $22 million to the University of Central Florida for the creation of a world-class school of hospitality management, and he has become involved in such diverse projects as “Water for Haiti,” raising funds to purchase specialized water filtration devices in order to provide fresh drinking water to one million people in Haiti and “The Bronze Statue Program” at Bethune-Cookman College. Most recently, Rosen pledged $3.5 million to build a Southwest Orlando Jewish Community Campus in Dr. Phillips. The Campus will bear the name, “The Jack and Lee Rosen Southwest Orlando Jewish Community Campus,” in honor of Mr. Rosen’s parents. As a result of his many heartfelt efforts, Harris Rosen is no longer simply a hotelier; he has become, in fact, a role model.

For more information about Rosen Shingle Creek, call (866) 996-9939 or visit www.oldrsc.com.

Rosen Hotels & Resorts currently owns and operates seven properties in the Orlando market. Numerous hospitality-industry awards, employee longevity and a reputation for quality have fueled the growth of Rosen Hotels & Resorts over the past 34 years. For more information about Rosen Hotels & Resorts, visit www.rosenhotels.com.

For more information, contact: Robert Hubler
(407) 639-4212, Email: rhubler@RosenHotels.com
Photography available in our Photo Gallery

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Florida Trend – Florida Icon Harris Rosen

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Florida Trend – Florida Icon Harris Rosen