Ritz Carlton's $100-Mil Bet On the Bay

HALF MOON BAY, CA-The world-renowned Ritz Carlton hotel company is preparing to open next week its first domestic resort in almost a decade. The Ritz Carlton at Half Moon Bay, which will test the limits of the Silicon Valley’s corporate hospitality appetite, is also the first five-star product on Northern California’s scenic Pacific Coast in more than a decade.

“It is not your parents Ritz Carlton,” says company spokeswoman Landry Fuller. “After hundreds of interviews in our research phase, we took dead aim on the two high tech centers, and our guests will see we’ve built a world class, tech-friendly hotel in an extraordinary setting.”

The resort proper consists of a main lodge and three adjacent guest houses, a 16,000-sfspa and 17,000 sf of meeting space, plus two on-property golf courses and Navio, its signature restaurant. Two thirds of the rooms have ocean views, and each room has three phones, high-speed Internet access, and an in-room safe large enough to fit a laptop computer. A “technology butler” is available to answer computer-related questions.