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.
Yep, the closest decent hotels are either in the Domain (7-9 minute drive) or the Arboretum (again 7-9 minute drive). The offices (old and new, as the current one is only about 2km away) are basically in a suburban area with nothing really but housing and small strip centers nearby.
And to one side of the new Apple campus, there's a particular kind of nothing, development-wise: Robinson Ranch.
It's a gigantic family-owned plot of land, about 7000 acres (11 square miles, 28 km^2).
The Robinson family could have sold it all off to developers, but so far they have been very limited about that. Mostly they've just allowed stuff with obvious public benefit like a high school.
So the new Apple campus is on a major road, and one side it's suburbs, but on the other side, it's trees, grass, and (this being Texas) a bit of cactus.
I think the commenters point, was that even if it an employee was staying literally across the highway from the campus, there would be no way to walk.
One you get to understand the road design in Texas, there are many advantages, such as their use of frontage roads and the ability to make u-turns under the highways without a traffic signal. But it generally speaks to the sprawl.
Our freeway system is ridiculous. We have a single interstate, multiple tolls and no 'loop' around the city. Houston and Dallas may be famous for their 8 lane highways but that is not how Austin is designed.
around Austin traffic is bad, it's not LA or NYC bad but it gets worse everyday. The most direct ways to get about and avoid some traffic is the toll roads, usually the alternative is the frontage roads that go alongside them (think a highway with regular lanes parallel with it). The road design and infrastructure was the most annoying part of Texas.
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
Yeah, the major toll roads in Austin are essentially empty enough that you never have to go below the speed limit. The campuses are off Parmer Ln, which isn’t in bad shape, it’s actually a pretty decent divided highway with 3 lanes on either side, but it’s not walkable or bikable at all and there are a ton of traffic lights.
I go up Parmer a lot to see my parents and I definitely see cyclists all the time. Maybe not ideal but it has a clear bike lane and it's enough that people actually use it.
No, the toll roads are pretty undeveloped but they’re a fast way to get places because they’re also lightly traveled except for people that absolutely have to and can afford to. The thing is, there’s really nothing along them except more suburban strip mall wasteland.
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.
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.
A lot of big companies do the PO built accommodation blocks at Bletchley Park - as that site was used for a lot of training after the GPO took BP over post world war 2
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.
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...
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.
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).
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.)
I assume it's a simple matter of real-estate price. There's lots of empty land in the area, and we all know how expensive stuff has gotten towards downtown. Also, many of the stodgier/enterprise-y big tech companies are up north (Dell, HP, GM, Oracle, etc.) which I assume is at least partly due to proximity to the suburbs. Older employees probably care more about that than exploring.
I am a contractor that works for Apple (specifically the Austin campus and live on the East coast) and always stay at the domain when I go. I’ve had a few times people convinced me to stay downtown but it’s really not worth the hassle. That being said the hotels at the domain are nice and the lyft drivers know the Apple campus very well.
Until relatively recently, there were few sizable tech companies in cities at all. This is true in Silicon Valley, Boston, NYC, etc. My company did add a small Boston office but that was primarily for the convenience of visiting executives from other companies as well as a couple other things that benefit from being in the city rather than an hour outside.
It seems really odd to suggest that Apple is placing their hotel near their own campus in order to somehow prevent employees from having fun. Why in the world would a company put a hotel far from their office? It's not like everyone won't have a rental car or access to Uber anyway.
I guess I'm odd, or I wasn't suggesting they'd place a hotel somewhere else just that they're adding one at all in that location given the lack of amenities/points of interest/etc., which is one of the few perks of business travel.
That said, I'll stand down completely on my knee-jerk comment on this because if you take the total visitors to Apple's Austin campus, some of those folks would not want to stay where the action is and so, to your point, the ones who want action can take an Uber. Everyone wins in that case, I suppose.
Also, if you don't think someone at Apple brought up the benefit of the hotel being at the campus itself and how that might factor into productivity you're less cynical about corporate America than I am (not a stretch; I'm pretty cynical).
Yeah, I think you're right. Totally possible and likely. And like I wrote in another reply Covid may make the "suburbs" everywhere a lot more interesting. That said, not sure the suburbanites want my personal version of "interesting" because I think the suburbs are the way they are because the people who live there like them that way.
It didn't happen in Silicon Valley. It has its moderately fun parts, but at some point, people realized it wasn't going to actually be fun and just moved to SF.
Deloitte has a campus with an on-site hotel in Westlake, Texas. I’ve spent lots of time there but I’ve never actually seen Dallas outside of the airport.
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.
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.
$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)
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/
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.
Raleigh itself has a nice if small downtown area. But much of the remaining Research Triangle area is spread out industrial parks (as well as some university campuses, Durham), suburban residential, etc.
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.
Most chains have their own design guides and standards that you must meet (everything from room layout to down to carpet tile choice, millwork for the front desk, etc) that make suddenly dropping into a building not really as easy as you might think.
It makes more sense to contract someone else to run it without their brand, unless they're paying for the opportunity to have their brand there.
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.
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.)
Wow really? I've never seen a company actually employ canteen staff, it's always been either totally subcontracted (eg Sodexo), or in very rare cases, managed by the company but with agency/contracting staff, definitely not official hires.
I guess it's pretty good for the cafeteria staff then, do they get the same health and bonus/stock perks as other staff?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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. ;)
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.
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)
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.
It's been mentioned on HN previously that Apple's internal/back office stuff is cheaply outsourced and nowhere near the level of its consumer products.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
