Tilman Fertitta’s New Showcase Hotel Wins Coveted Five Diamond Rating Just Six Months After Opening: Houston is Back on the National Hotel Map

By Chris Baldwin // Sep 12, 2018

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The Post Oak Hotel's lobby presents a dramatic sense of arrival.

Houston's Post Oak Hotel is dotted with stunning art pieces.

Billionaire Tilman Fertitta lords over a 500-company strong business empire from his Houston headquarters.

The Post Oak Hotel is already changing The Galleria area skyline. Soon, it will have company.

Bloom & Bee's striking look in The Post Oak Hotel is already drawing raves.

The ceiling of the Post Oak Hotel's new Bloom & Bee restaurant is striking.

The Post Oak Hotel's pool will be quite the scene some nights.

The Post Oak Hotel has one of the most dramatic stairways in Texas.

The guest bedroom where linens are Fretti.

Six monitors are set up behind Tilman Fertitta's huge desk. He really does have eyes in the back of his head. (Photo by Max Burkhalter.)

Tilman Fertitta spent more than a decade plotting, envisioning and then building his showcase Houston hotel with one overriding end goal. The billionaire wanted to give Houston one of the best hotels in the world.

Consider it, mission accomplished.

At least in the early returns. For just six months after opening, The Post Oak’s earned a coveted Five Diamond rating from AAA. It immediately becomes the first hotel in Houston to hold such a rating — and only the third in the entire state of Texas.

“The Post Oak Hotel has been recognized as one of North America’s most luxurious hotels,” Fertitta says. “I’m proud to be the only in Houston to receive this honor and hope for continued success in the future.”

Fertitta and his handpicked hotel general manager, Jorge Gonzalez, set about systematically implementing five star best practices at The Post Oak from the very beginning. This was always the vision — one worked for every day in the hotel’s swank corridors and a lobby marked by major museum-worthy art.

Gonzalez even reached out to the Forbes Travel Guide powers that be to get the exact criteria the travel bible requires a five star hotel to have in all the categories rated. There are no Forbes Travel Guide Five Star hotels currently in Texas — and this Five Diamond AAA rating could be a first step toward reaching that stratosphere.

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“We started training to the standards from day one,” Gonzalez told PaperCity in an exclusive interview after the hotel’s opening. “I believe you have to give your staff the right tools to succeed. And everyone on staff knows the standards.”

Vaunted travel guide AAA certainly feels the utmost luxury standards have been met at The Post Oak. This Houston tower — with its million dollar lobby chandelier, Rolls Royce and Bugatti dealership and a $30,000 Howard Hodgkin print just hanging over a manicure station in the spa — is now one of only 89 hotels in the United States that holds the Five Diamond status.

It’s a major national win for Houston’s new showcase hotel — one that may herald even bigger international honors to come.