
Apple adds 192-room hotel to plans of Northwest Austin campus - ingenieros
https://austin.culturemap.com/news/city-life/05-20-20-apple-adds-surprising-element-to-1-billion-campus-in-northwest-austin/
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karlkatzke
To add to the information in this story (because I live in the neighborhood),
there aren’t a ton of hotel options nearby, and all of the hotel options
nearby are along the non-toll road freeways and all require a drive or ride
share.

~~~
Scoundreller
Are the non-toll road freeways in really bad shape or?

~~~
kgermino
I was wondering why they specified as well. My guess: the toll roads have much
less traffic (for their size) than the free ones. I know that by me the toll
is usually worth it if you value your time at all since the dedicated funding
gives them the money to maintain and expand the road as needed.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> since the dedicated funding gives them the money to maintain and expand the
> road as needed.

The funding rarely has anything to do with it. In nearly all cases road tolls
are priced far in excess of what it takes to maintain that stretch of road and
the money is then reallocated to other things.

What you're experiencing is that the toll deters other drivers from using that
road, so there is less traffic on it. This is quite unegalitarian, because
you're essentially creating a road for the upper class and then charging more
than its maintenance cost to keep out the proles. Whereas if the tolls only
covered maintenance of the toll road then the collection overhead would
consume most of the money -- it's already not an insignificant cost even when
the tolls are disproportionately high.

They also create a perverse incentive for the government to leave non-toll
roads in disrepair to increase their toll revenue by pushing people to the
toll road.

~~~
kgermino
That may be true generally - I have no idea - but it definitely isn’t in
Illinois. The tolls stay in the system and don’t support any non-tolled roads.
If anything the subsidies go the other way, since cities will pay to have a
ramp built that will then generate tolls for the main highway. I have no idea
what percentage of the toll goes to collection costs.

As far as un-egalitarian, I respectfully disagree. I’m sure there are people
who can’t afford the toll costs, but “pay for what you use” seems perfectly
reasonable to me. I guess that may be different if money is taken from the
toll road as you described.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
"Pay for what you use" in the case of roads would be the incremental amount of
road damage caused by each vehicle, rather than the total road cost divided by
the number of vehicles.

The large majority of road maintenance costs are attributable to weather and
semi trucks. (Road damage from vehicles is _the fourth power_ of vehicle
weight, so one semi does as much damage as thousands of cars.)

Moreover, the problem with allocating the fixed cost (weather) portion of road
maintenance to cars, or the cost attributable to large trucks, is then you
over-deter use of the road. You don't want an inefficiency where you deter
someone from using the road even though they value their use of it more than
the cost to the state of allowing them to, because then you waste idle road
capacity for which the fixed construction costs must be paid either way. Doing
that also requires the amount of the toll to be even higher, because then you
have to amortize the fixed costs over fewer vehicles. You end up with tolls
much higher than the efficient level per vehicle even if the tolls do only pay
for road maintenance, because of the over-deterrence.

The better solution is to pay the fixed cost portion from general taxes and
only charge the marginal cost for usage.

But if you charge only the marginal cost for "light" passenger vehicles then
the amount is so small as to not even be worth collecting.

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dhosek
McDonald's has a hotel on its corporate headquarters campus in Oak Brook. It's
run by Hyatt and anyone can book rooms there (we've done a couple
"staycations" there in the winter to be able to have a weekend where we can
avoid Chicago cold/stay inside the whole time and have access to a swimming
pool). I'd guess a large fraction of the business comes from people attending
meetings at corporate or training at Hamburger U, but they also host typical
hotel things like non-McDonald's conferences and weddings etc. Most, but not
all, of the hallway art has a McDonald's theme.

~~~
colmmacc
Boeing has Hilton Garden Inns hotels right at Everett field where the wide-
bodies are made, and in Renton where the 737s are made. They're a sight to see
because they seem very very out of place. But they do a steady trade in Boeing
attendees coming in for training, as well as customers coming to negotiate,
inspect, and pickup new planes. I got to play a private party in the Everett
one, to celebrate a new plane delivery for a customer. The staff told they
once had a super-rich Emir book out a whole floor and stay there for a few
days while a private jumbo was being delivered. The idea of that happening at
a garden inn amuses me.

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dehrmann
Ugh. At a former job, I worked in a satellite office. At one point, I spent
three weeks at the main office, embedding with another team. The office was
_connected_ to a hotel I stayed at. The room, an apartment room with a
kitchenette and, inexplicably, two bathrooms, while nice, overlooked the
office. I'd get off work, go to my room, and see teams' dashboards on TVs from
my window. For three weeks. I tried to avoid that hotel for the rest of my
time there.

Worth mentioning that unlike Apple's Austin campus, this was in a central
district in a major city, so there wasn't a big compromise between a fun
neighborhood and being close to the office.

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harmmonica
This is interesting because Apple's Austin campus is a good distance from the
neighborhoods in Austin most people want to hang out/go out/be in. This is one
of those things that's far from categorical, as evidenced by other comments in
the thread where people appreciate being close to the office when having to
travel for work, but I personally, and people of my ilk, like exploring the
places we visit when traveling for work and this hotel will make exploring
much more inconvenient. Maybe that's even Apple's goal...

~~~
lesdeuxmagots
They're staying near the domain area, which seems an incredibly reasonable.
Relatively accessible via multiple freeways from population centers and the
airport, close to many other tech campuses. Larger tech campuses optimize for
those sorts of factors far more than where people want to hang out.

~~~
harmmonica
Reasonable absolutely. Convenient, sensible for employees easily being able to
get to work. Airport is not close considering it's on the opposite side of the
city, but, sure, close enough.

That said, I genuinely find it interesting that they would put a hotel in that
location because of a lack of amenities and interesting things to explore (I'm
betraying my attitude about the domain and that area in general, but I would
not call it interesting/enjoyable/fun to explore unless you like mega malls
and top golf, which some folks do, but people visiting from out of town likely
would not when they can just as easily get that back home). Maybe they were
even debating whether to include the hotel at all until Covid came along and
made the decision for them--the suburbs are the new city centers (btw, I
realize they're in the city technically).

~~~
ghaff
Usually when I'm visiting a company it's a long day (or days) of meetings
followed by business dinners. I'm as much for exploring new areas as anyone
but the last thing I want to do at the end of such a day is take a drive into
a not-so-close city.

I used to work for someone who would drive a number of us a bit crazy because
he always wanted to do team meeting dinners in the city about an hour from the
office where we would meet during the day--which was actually the wrong
direction from where many of us lived. (He, somewhat understandably, wasn't
crazy about the dining options near the office.)

------
dijit
Makes some amount of sense.

I work for an international company that is small in comparison to Apple (15k
employees) and Hotels for international travel are a pain.

Having one on-site is probably going to save them some money in the long run.

~~~
chrisseaton
What pains do you experience with hotels? I find they're the usually by far
the easiest part of an international trip.

~~~
dijit
Normally a mixture of:

How close is it, what's the contiguous capacity of it, is it the cheapest,
what is our relationship with it (payment methods, we prefer invoicing), does
it require a down-payment to be paid by the traveller, if so how do we
reimburse that.

In contrast, flights are usually pretty easy; pick an flight and pay.

~~~
lotsofpulp
I have a feeling hotel payment modes are stuck in the 1980s because the
franchisors (Hilton/Marriott/IHG/Hyatt/etc) don’t want to pay for any of the
merchant processing or chargeback fees, so they don’t care about updating
their payment platforms to make it easy for consumers.

You can make a reservation at IHG.com with a fake credit card 4111 1111 1111
1111 and they do zero name/address/CVV verification, and the only reason I can
tell is because they’re not the ones stuck with dealing with chargebacks and
fees.

~~~
dvtrn
$lastjob was for a software vendor adjacent to but servicing directly into the
hospitality and service industries. Some of our clients included the names you
mentioned; I can say from direct experience with three of them, they care a
lot about their payment platforms and improving the tech associated, one of
them, Marriott has an entire technical certification program that any tech
vendor interested in doing business at a hotel with their name on it must go
through.

It’s just _SLOW_. Hoteliers “love” technology but they are damned SLOW to do
_anything_ with it sometimes (I don’t mean implementation here, there can be
all sorts of reasons for implementation to take a long time, I mean the
decision cycles from directors and executives of chains)

------
angled
I expect several airlines have something similar already - Cathay Pacific
operates its own on-campus hotel for crew based elsewhere:
[https://www.headland.com.hk/](https://www.headland.com.hk/)

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drewg123
SAS, in Cary NC, also has a hotel on campus. The only other options require
crossing a busy 6+ lane street where pedestrians are uncommon.

~~~
brnt
Nobody thought of a pedestrian bridge/tunnel?

~~~
aquaticsunset
That area is a huge car culture city. You’re lucky if these major roads even
have sidewalks.

~~~
cpach
For someone living in Europe, this seems slightly surreal :-p

~~~
pentae
You might have a bit of a shock in SE Asia then

~~~
cpach
I’ve never been there unfortunately. How is the car culture there? How does
the people without cars get by?

~~~
ghaff
Scooters/motorbikes (not the e-scooters you stand on). There are also various
degrees of public transit. But, while there are some exceptions like
Singapore, a lot of large SE Asian cities are congested sprawl that takes
forever to get around.

------
ideals
It's safe to assume Apple will not be embracing a permanent shift to remote
work.

2million sq/ft of glorious open floor plan seating.

~~~
raverbashing
Apple does not do open floor plans. At least not between departments

From what I remember reading every department is closed off and some are only
accessible to those with permission to enter.

~~~
colde
That used to be the case. But with the new Apple Park campus, they changed
that significantly: [https://www.dezeen.com/2017/08/10/apple-park-campus-
employee...](https://www.dezeen.com/2017/08/10/apple-park-campus-employees-
rebel-over-open-plan-offices-architecture-news/)

According to the article the hardware team managed to avoid it by complaining
loud enough that they goy their own building.

~~~
xyst
The hardware team has their own space yet they produced garbage like the
2016-‘17 MBP.

One of the many blunders:

[https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/363337/how-to-
find...](https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/363337/how-to-find-cause-
of-high-kernel-task-cpu-usage/363933#363933)

~~~
sys_64738
Wonder how hard it is to find a private corner to work in on that space ship
campus. It certainly seems out of this world.

------
waiwai933
> He cites an Embassy Suites hotel as a possibility.

I'd have expected it to be open to Apple employees/contractors/guests
travelling on official Apple business, and thus wouldn't carry a chain brand.

~~~
vidanay
Conversely, I'd expect it to be licensed out to a renewable operational
contract by a major chain who has the experience and domain skills to run a
hotel. If they don't meet Apple standards, they can be dropped at the end of
the contract.

~~~
waiwai933
I'd have thought they could get a chain to run it, but using custom Apple
branding. Similarly, they could probably pay the chain/management company a
flat fee/fee based on performance standards, rather than letting them do
market pricing.

~~~
sjwright
It won’t be Apple branded. More likely a generic brand, or something that’s
linked to Apple without using the name. Like how their campus cafe is Caffé
Macs.

(Best hotel name I can come up with is “Energy Saver” in the style of macOS
System Preferences. Cute, and comes with a free logo. But I doubt the Apple of
today would dare to be so whimsical.)

------
adrianmonk
Austin has a lot of events where all the hotels are all booked up. Presumably
Apple can give reservation priority to its guests. The headaches saved from
that alone could make this worthwhile.

Austin is a decent-sized city but not a particularly large one, so hotel
capacity isn't huge. And there's SXSW, Austin City Limits music festival, a
Formula 1 track, the Republic of Texas biker rally (200,000 attendees). Not to
mention graduation weekend for the University of Texas, which is a big campus
with over 50,000 enrolled.

~~~
alttab
I wonder how many of those events will still occur, and how long it will take
them to reach those crowd sizes again.

------
dangus
Not directly related to the topic, but this is the first time I’ve seen
renders of this new campus and it surprises me that it’s so car-dependent and
suburban. It kind of disappoints me especially from a company publicly
emphasizing environmental responsibility.

That same aspect really surprised me about Apple Park: how the building is so
futuristic, but then getting there requires you hop in your regressive oil-
burning couch on wheels. Personally, I would never again work for a company
that made me drive down a highway to a giant parking garage complex. I want
transit-oriented development and I want to live and work near transit lines,
in walkable areas with mixed-use amenities.

If my choices in 2020 are remote work, suburban car commute, or downtown city
office commute watching YouTube on a bus or train, one of these options is the
clear last-place option.

My parents told me an anecdote of how they recently drove to the center of
town (the old part built for walking) just to get out and walk around, as if
this is a normal and not-insane byproduct of our misguided city planning.
Their home is so isolated and pedestrian-hostile that they have to drive a
vehicle just to find somewhere pleasant to _exist._ (The same story goes for
getting to a park or outdoor recreation area)

Suburbs have all the downsides of a city with none of the upsides of rural
life.

Obviously, it’s not Apple’s fault that most American cities happened to make
massive city planning mistakes after World War II. But it seems like so many
of those mistakes continue to be perpetuated by all parties involved.

~~~
ghaff
>If my choices in 2020 are remote work, suburban car commute, or downtown city
office commute watching YouTube on a bus or train, one of these options is the
clear last-place option.

It depends where you live. If I drive into my company's suburban office (which
I have rarely done for the past few years), I'm about a 25-30 minute drive. If
I take the commuter rail into the city to go to another office, I'm about 90
minutes door-to-door between drive to train/train/subway/walk. I don't mind
doing the latter now and then, but if I had to make the choice most days, that
wouldn't be my pick.

I did commute into the city semi-regularly for about a year once. It really
wasn't sustainable over a long period even though I didn't need to do it every
day most weeks.

~~~
dangus
If you didn’t live in the suburbs, it wouldn’t take you 90 minutes to get into
the city.

If your suburban office didn’t have a huge parking lot in front of it,
adjacent to a grass knoll, adjacent to a four lane highway, which also has a
grass strip in between it, with your house set back from your street with a
lawn and driveway, with your street hidden in curvy cul-de-sac roads from the
main road to alleviate thru traffic, you might have an actual chance at
walking, biking, or taking a bus to your suburban office. But it’s all been
designed around the car so now you must own your very own car to go
_anywhere_.

~~~
ghaff
I actually live in the country (maybe technically exurbs). No amount of
sidewalks or bike paths or reasonable density bus routes is going to get me to
either of my offices. This isn't a new thing. My house was built in 1823 well
before things were designed for cars.

~~~
ghettoimp
This is completely fair and is absolutely a very real thing for many people.
But only about 19% of the US population lives in rural areas, for some
definition [1] of rural.

Unlike rural areas, cities are dense enough that we could certainly choose to
build them in a different way, so that we are not all completely dependent on
our cars to go anywhere. For a lot of folks, I think it's definitely a
discussion worth having.

[1] [https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-
releases/2016/cb16-210...](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-
releases/2016/cb16-210.html)

~~~
ghaff
I'm actually not rural by the US Census definition. And probably not
especially close even though I and a couple neighbors are on 100 acres between
us. I live in a 7K person town and it's not even remotely rural by US Census
definitions.

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fma
The General Motors headquarters, "Ren Cen" has a 73 floor Marriott Hotel tower
with ~1,300 rooms in the middle. You can access all 7 of the towers w/o going
outside.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Center](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Center)

~~~
ikeyany
Having stayed at that hotel last year, those elevators seriously need an
upgrade.

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gumby
> Apple is a trendsetter in so many ways. Its proposed hotel as part of its
> new Austin campus is another example of it being ahead of the curve,”

It’s quite common in some countries for companies and other institutions
hotels or guest houses on site, especially when ravel is difficult. And even
when not it’s _very_ typical for companies to have a with local hotels for
their visitors. This is just another case of wiggling the dividing line
between in-house/outsourcing that companies do with fungible tasks like
cafeterias, cleaning, call center etc.

------
kevindong
For large corporations expecting a lot of inter-office travel, it makes a lot
of sense. I assume the company owns the hotel and therefore has first dibs on
rooms and pays minimal costs to whomever ultimately operates the hotel.

I interned at a company with 50k employees that's redeveloping their HQ
campus. The redevelopment includes a fairly large hotel on site because the
company has a decent amount of business travelers coming/going every day. The
main office building currently has a room dedicated to storing luggage for
employees traveling.

------
PaulWaldman
It is also quite common for universities to have hotels on campus.

~~~
vidanay
Yeah, but they are almost always affiliated with a hospitality/hotel
management degree program.

~~~
txcwpalpha
The hotel on campus at UT Austin isn’t affiliated with any such program. It’s
actually affiliated with the business school, AFAIK, and the circumstances
around it’s creation sound similar to Apple’s.

At the time, there weren’t many good hotel options around that part of Austin
unless you were willing to stay in a motel or a long drive away. I imagine
this was a big obstacle when trying to attract MBA students to the weekend MBA
programs (where the students are put up at a hotel every weekend) or trying to
get business bigwigs to visit campus for events, so UT just decided to build
their own hotel.

------
punnerud
Similar to CERN where they have hotels within the campus.

Only difference is that while working at CERN you don’t pay tax on your
earnings, spending, car etc.

~~~
iancmceachern
Fermilab too, I've stayed at their hotel working on their collider.

------
rektide
The simple boring & likely option is that this is a matter of convenience, to
help visitors &c.

The cool option, the unlikely one, is that this would also be a technological
testbed for a well integrated technical living space. A modest small go at a
lab, to try out how we might integrate computing & living. As I said:
unlikely. ;)

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yitchelle
Separation of life between work and non-work is really important, especially
if long term mental health is concern. Personally, I would burned out really
fast in this scenario. This is the pressure I felt when I go on week long
business trips where days are spent in the office, and night are spent
preparation for the next day.

------
PanMan
I work for a small hotel chain, and have often joked about the tech stack if
apple would run a hotel (with no legacy)... Time to see how it will actually
look! (Although I guess they'll outsource the management to a hotel chain)

~~~
ghaff
Vaguely amusing related story. During the 2000s, I stayed at the IBM executive
meeting center in Palisades NY. It was managed by some hospitality company or
other but it was very IBM branded (lots of old tech displays, etc.)

It also definitely had legacy IBM tech. This was before WiFi really took off
and the guest rooms all had Token Ring. Which, as I recall, necessitated
warning stickers all over the place because you'd fry your Ethernet if you
tried to plug in. At some point, I think they redid it but then they offloaded
the facility.

------
seanmcdirmid
This reminds me of the old SOE/school hotels in China. They generally provide
less service than the dedicated hotels, and feel a bit archaic, but that might
have just been the era.

------
deugtniet
Perhaps this is partly driven by COVID. A hotel is a great isolation facility.
Having one for essential staff would be a massive benefit if you need them
close by at short notice.

------
dmitriid
Honestly, this makes a lot if sense. Any medium-to-large company will always
need to book hotels for people traveling. At Apple's size it might be cheaper
(and definitely more convenient) to operate their own hotel than to always
look for ways to book and transport people around.

~~~
ghaff
>At Apple's size it might be cheaper (and definitely more convenient) to
operate their own hotel

Can be. Depends on the circumstances. There are the capital costs and then the
company presumably outsources the running of the hotel to a hospitality
company that needs to turn a profit on their management.

In general, there's been a long-term trend away from companies owning
corporate retreat properties, executive meeting centers, etc. A number of big
old-line tech companies I'm familiar with sold off marquee properties over the
past 2 or 3 decades.

But if you're building a campus and there aren't great existing lodging
options, it may make sense. They can presumably sell it off at some point if
they don't want to own it.

------
ape4
I can only hope everything in the room has a macOS GUI

~~~
petepete
I'd hate to stay in a hotel room with no Windows.

~~~
cardinalfang
It would be a Doss-house.

------
Theodores
They could add a museum of Apple stuff so that true believers can go there on
holiday. Disneyland for Apple enthusiasts would be a revenue earner, you could
go there to buy new Apple goodies to spend quality time at the genius bar.

~~~
saagarjha
Not a museum, but there’s an Apple Park Visitor Center where you can buy
stuff.

