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Allyson Kane
Allyson Kane has been writing since age 5 though her only published work is a story written in 1981 about a pink rabbit that wished he could fly. It was framed and hung in her grandmother's kitchen. Living in New England for long enough to be considered a Red Sox fan, Allyson is a Senior Marketing Project Manager in Starwood's Global Web Services department. She holds a Master's Degree in Integrated Marketing from Manhattanville College. Allyson is known and respected for her ability to Parallel Park and her addiction to Diet Coke.
Specialty: New England
See all of Allyson Kane’s 1 postsAndrew Huff
Andrew Huff is a writer and editor living in Chicago. He loves a good Indian mango, a peaty scotch and a juicy hamburger – although not usually all at the same time. When not at home, he's wishing he was in New Orleans.
Specialty: Food
Candice Kraughto
Still planning her perfect overseas honeymoon, Candice frequently island hops with her husband among the Hawaiian archipelago she calls home. The director of public relations for Starwood Hotels & Resorts Hawaii, Candice considers herself blessed to enjoy romantic weekend getaways throughout the islands (Maui, Kauai, Big Island, Molokai and Lanai) many couples only dream of.
Whether she's singing karaoke in Korea, hiking to a Kurdish village in Turkey, shopping in Thailand, sipping oolong tea in Taiwan or just perusing a Hawaiian-Chinese history museum in Maui, Candice seeks out unique and culturally adventurous events and activities. She and her husband have already enjoyed several mini-honeymoons in New York, San Francisco and throughout the Hawaiian Islands, but plan to tango in Argentina on their next great escape.
Specialty: Hawaii, Romance/Adventure
Carly Eiseman
Left-handed at everything she does, writer/editor Carly Eiseman is known for packing heavy and regular suitcase jumping. With Venice, California as her home base, she hunts the globe in search of perfect espresso, spicy chocolate, colorful socks and unforgettable photos. Cultivating the world's first known collection of toothpaste from foreign countries, she currently brushes with Aronal from Germany and occasionally blogs about cool design objects at objetsmart.com.
Specialty: Design, Art
Celeste Sunderland
Infatuated with Campari, Bionade, and Earl Grey tea, Berlin based writer Celeste Sunderland bikes the city's streets in search of the best places to consume them. A Rhode Island native, she also really likes the beach, tiny museums, and open air markets.
Specialty: International/Events
Dana McMahan
Dana has fueled her passion for travel and food eating her way from Inverness to Istanbul, along the way enjoying culinary adventures like a cooking class in Florence, Italy, and a behind the scenes tour of a Paris boulangerie.
She has logged some four months of travel time in Europe in the last few years. She has stayed in youth hostels, guest houses, apartments, villas, pensions, and hotels with no-star through 5. She has traveled by low-cost air, business class air, free air, train, taxi, boat, ship, ferry, bus, subway, tram, cable car and rental car. She planned a trip to Italy once with only a week's notice and can file a police report in French.
Dana's an award-winning travel photographer and has written for International Travel News magazine. Dana shares her travel and culinary explorations on Airport.ca and Forks.ca, as well as arbitrary ramblings on www.travelingmcmahans.wordpress.com.
When she's not cooking, traveling or blogging, she teaches a class on European travel planning and works as a Web content developer. She most recently returned from a father/daughter motorcycle trip along the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Specialty: SPG Member
Hanna Kim
Hanna is a California native gone New Yorker who has serendipitously fallen into the writer's chair. When she isn't obsessively reading one blog or another, she can be seen in her natural habitat- in a bar sipping a dry vodka martini
Specialty: Fashion
Jack Martin
Jack Martin recently retired with over 35 years in the commercial nuclear industry. He enjoys backpacking in Big Bend and the Guadalupe Mountains of Texas as a life-time Sierra Club member when he is not satisfying every whim of his new boss, Beth (his wife of over 34 years). He is the Vice President and principal consultant a small privately owned business that provides root cause analysis and management improvement analysis to businesses between hikes, cruises and completing the ever growing honey-do list.
Specialty: SPG Member
Jae Knowlton
Jae Knowlton is the Operations Manager for the Austin Customer Contact Center. He has been in the Starwood family since November 1993 when he began working with ITT Sheraton. Over the past 14 years, he has worked in Hotel Customer Service, SPG Member Services and spent four years as a Six Sigma Black Belt. In his current position, he is responsible for a growing team of 10 Sales Supervisors and 180 Reservation Sales Associates.
A native of Chicago, he used to play bass guitar in a band called Slack and was part of a dance troupe that opened for Roy Orbison at a honky-tonk bar in Ft. Worth.
Specialty: Family
Jaime Gottlieb
Jaime Gottlieb is currently the Manager of Online Communications for the Luxury Brands Group, where she proudly plays the role of resident wordsmith, grammar watchdog and comma commando. Jaime has been a writer/editor for the last seven years, building content and helping to expand small companies including her tenure as Web Producer/Editor/Event Coordinator for a social networking start-up and as Editor-in-Chief of online advertising publication, Adotas.
A Florida native, Jaime loves to travel, go river tubing and visit her family in Fort Lauderdale. She's also a self-proclaimed nacho enthusiast and actually had a nacho blog at one point.
Specialty: Luxury
Jan Roberts
Jan Roberts’ globe-trotting grandparents inspired her own wanderlust and she spent a lot of her early life in travel mode, exploring out of the way places before anyone had even heard of the term “adventure travel.” At 60 she’s still travelling, but these days her trips are mostly business-related. She’s a successful author and speaker and her hot topic “Healthy Parents = Healthy Babies” puts her in front of audiences around the world. Down-time between presentations means a hiking trail, a deserted beach or some fresh champagne powder.
Specialty: SPG Member
Jeremy McCarthy
Infatuated with Campari, Bionade, and Earl Grey tea, Berlin based writer Celeste Sunderland bikes the city's streets in search of the best places to consume them. A Rhode Island native, she also really likes the beach, tiny museums, and open air markets.
Specialty: Spa
Laura Rohrman
Laura Rohrman, a Northern California native, got the travel bug early -- when she moved to Paris, France and spent three months backpacking all over Europe while still only a teenager. This mountain-climbing, adventure-seeker is also an award-winning, produced playwright, actress and journalist. Laura’s favorite holidays include: the beaches of Maui, the rain forests of Domnica, the mountains of California, the Cliffs of Dover in Ireland, dancing in Carnival, Brazil -- and sleeping under the stars at night and rafting during the day while on a trip through the Grand Canyon. These days Laura works for DIRECTV in partnership marketing, but still travels whenever possible. She’s been an SPG member since 2007.
Specialty: Adventure
Lucy Williams
Lucy Williams is an Orlando-based writer who plans to run a marathon on every continent.
As a writer for Starwood Vacation Ownership, Lucy Williams provides the inside scoop on vacation ownership properties, contests and notable offers. She brings the latest resort news and special messages from the Starwood Vacation Ownership Marketing team and Starwood Vacation Owners.
When she's not writing, Lucy makes the most of the year-round Florida sunshine. An avid runner and swimmer, she plans to complete the Kona Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii, and run a marathon in Greece, the birthplace of the marathon. After a long day on her feet, Lucy appreciates returning to a comfortable retreat where she can relax by the pool.
Specialty: Vacation Ownership
Maxime Francis
Even at birth Max caused quite a stir: when she was born, a name war broke out between her mother [who wanted to name her Maximilian] and her father [who wanted to name her Natouska]. Luckily there was a cease fire and they settled on Maxime. She often wonders what languages they argued in: Max's mother speaks 6 fluently; her father 4.
An only child, Maxime is French, Jewish, German, English and from the island of Martinique. She speaks two languages fluently so if you’re lucky enough to be this socialite’s object of desire she’ll be sure to win you over with her language skills.
In addition to street haggling, museum hopping and milkshakes, Max likes to shop, but loves a bargain even more, which is why she can often be found at Target (her favorite store). Max loves dogs and owns two cuties names Dior and Milk, both of whom she carries as accessories on her many gallivants around her native city of New York.
A web guru Max is currently employed at Starwood Hotels as the Interactive Marketing Manager for Starwood Preferred Guest.
Specialty: SPG Socialite
Michael Goldrich
Michael Goldrich is currently the Director of Program Management and Globalization at Starwood Hotels & Resorts, where he is responsible for the execution of business strategies.
Prior to joining Starwood, Michael led a team at Monster Worldwide that was responsible for on-line marketing campaigns as well as ongoing customer support for the site. Before that, he worked on enterprise-level web projects as a management consultant at Andersen Consulting which later became Accenture. He has a Master's degree from Northwestern in a multi-disciplinary degree sponsored by the Business, Law, Engineering and Communication schools. His undergraduate degree is in English Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He currently lives in Westchester, New York with his wife and three sons.
Specialty: Family
Niall Twamley
Niall Twamley is presently the Branded Experience Analyst in the Cork CCC and an employee of Starwood since December 2001. Beginning in reservations, he moved into Corporate Customer Services in 2003. With a degree in German and Economics, he works with a small, but tightly knit team spread between Cork, Ireland and Austin, Texas.
A member of the winning Irish "College Bowl" TV quiz tournament in 2001, he was also a member of his university's softball club.
Specialty: Ireland
Niklas Schlappkohl
Originally from Munich, Germany, Niklas completed degrees in linguistics in Germany and the US, plus a year abroad in China and studies in Spain. He moved to Paris where he obtained a Master's before beginning his career at Netscape Europe and then IBM France, before moving to Argentina and working at an Internet startup in Buenos Aires.
One year later, he began his first position in the Hospitality Industry at a luxury boutique hotel chain in Miami and the Caribbean, thus combining work and personal interests. Niklas now works as business lead for the non-English websites at Starwood Hotels & Resorts, where he is responsible for the development of strategy, and managing functionality and marketing.
Specialty: International Travel
Peter Foreman
A native of Australia's Gold Coast, Peter Foreman studied Business Management in Hospitality & Catering before moving to Spain where he worked at the 1992 World Expo in Seville. Following a six month touring holiday of Europe and the US, he settled back to Australia where he has worked for the past decade in a variety of positions at the Sheraton Mirage Port Douglas and the Sheraton Langkawi Beach Resort in Malaysia. In July 2007, he relocated to China where he is presently the Director of Sales & Marketing at the Sheraton Haikou Resort.
Specialty: China
Rick Kolsky
Rick Kolsky, veteran road warrior, is a business school professor, management consultant, and die-hard youth basketball coach. Rick and his wife of 30 years, Anne Jacobson, spend their free time and spare change exploring our glorious planet, having visited 49 states and 6 continents. Highlights include an unplanned overnight hike in the wilderness of the Denali foothills, a six-day Kilimanjaro climb (and six-hour descent), a hailstorm while camping near Split, a waterlogged Bhutan mountain trek, three days hanging with a pride of 16 lions in the Savuti savannah, exchanging "monkey faces" with wild chimpanzees in Tanzania, NOT wearing a speedo or thong on Copacabana beach in Rio, sunrise at Macchu Pichu, an audience with the Singh Sahib in Amritsar, and a Saharan sandstorm in Morocco.
Specialty:
Rita Stein
A native of Los Angeles...a former BH talent agent & current writer/ L.A. correspondent for the foreign press (France & Austria)...i am always in search of new locales, upscale hotels properties, museums, nightlife, fashion....anything of cultural or entertainment value....my friends KNOW I love my job, I love to travel, I love to discover and I love people!!!
Specialty: SPG Member
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Beijing
Famous for its long history and splendid culture, the capitol of the People's Republic of China may just be one of the most scenic cities in the world. Book your trip now!
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