It pays to be flexible. When Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman came to New York in March he needed some overflow suites that The Plaza apparently couldn’t accommodate, so the guests were sent off to the Trump Organization’s Trump International Hotel.
The “last-minute” five-day delegation was responsible for bumping the Manhattan property’s revenue from rental rooms by 13 percent in the first quarter of 2018–no paltry figure for a hotel that hasn’t reported such gains since 2015, according to a report by the Washington Post.
The circumstances of the profitable visit came to light in a letter the hotel’s general manager Prince Sanders wrote in May.
“Due to our close industry relationships,” Sanders wrote in the letter, obtained by the Post, “We were able to accommodate many of the accompanying travelers.” Neither the Crown Prince nor any members of the royal family stayed in the Trump hotel, Sanders explained in the letter.
The revelation comes as a federal judge in Maryland permitted a lawsuit to proceed which alleges that President Donald Trump is in violation of the Constitution’s “emoluments clauses”–measures meant to prevent a president from putting their private interests ahead of the public’s–when government business checks into his hotels.
After the Post’s story was published, New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood said she was conducting her own similar investigation into Trump’s New York businesses. [WP]