The Trump family is launching a new hotel chain in a bold expansion of a company that critics say is already too big and opaque for an enterprise whose owner sits in the Oval Office. The chain, called Scion, will feature the first Trump-run hotels not to bear the family’s gilded name.
The hotels will feature modern, sleek interiors and communal areas, and offer rooms at $200 to $300 a night, about half what it costs at some hotels in Trump’s luxury chain. And they’ll be dozens of them, possibly a hundred, opening across the US in just three years. Or at least that’s the plan.
The Trump family won’t be putting up any money to build the hotels. Instead, their company, the Trump Organization, plans to get local real estate developers and their investors to foot the bill, as do most major hotel chains.
One of the first going up could be in Dallas. A development company there originally planned to raise money from investors in Kazakhstan, Turkey and Qatar, but recently told the Dallas Morning News that it now will tap only the company’s US partners. Government ethics experts say turning to outside money, whether foreign or American, raises the spectre of people trying to use their investment to gain favour with the new administration – like contributing to a political campaign, but with no dollar limits or public disclosure (source: Associated press).