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JFK’s Luxury Animal Hotel Business is Off to Bad Start

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John F. Kennedy International Airport’s one-year old animal hotel, called the Ark, offers traveling creatures luxurious accommodations that most human passengers could only dream of. Such comforts include special cold quarters for penguins, private stalls with soft floors for horses, and so on.

However, this new pet paradise is off to a rocky start. So far revenue has been only around $450,000, which is over 90 percent below the original projections.

In a lawsuit filed last week in Queens by the Ark’s owner, he blames the landlord, which is the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, for the business failure. The owner claims, “The Ark at JFK is in imminent danger of shutting down.”

Crain’s News reports, “The Ark contends it was granted the exclusive right to provide shelter and veterinary services to all pets, livestock and birds passing through JFK in return for investing $65 million to transform a vacant cargo building into a state-of-the-art, 178,000-square-foot animal hotel. However, the suit says, the Port Authority has steered most animal traffic to another facility it owns two hours north, in Newburgh, that is leased to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. A Port Authority spokesman did not reply to a request for comment. The Ark and Newburgh facilities charge about the same, according to an animal-transport executive, but many owners of dogs, horses and other creatures prefer Newburgh so they can avoid New York City traffic, particularly on the Van Wyck Expressway. ‘Especially if you live out of state, Newburgh is a lot more convenient than JFK,’ said the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The Ark was seen by animal-movers and people moved by animals as a great leap forward when the Port Authority announced its creation in 2014. For years, animals traveling through JFK were quarantined in a 10,000-square-foot, 1950s-era building called the VetPort, which suffered from a bad location and poor management.”

Racebrook Capital’s John Cuticelli is the developer of the Ark. Cuticelli, who specializes in breathing new life into failing hotels and condos, agreed to pay $138 million to the Port Authority of the course of a 27-year lease. 138 million in rent over a 27-year lease.

Stephen Meister, Cuticelli’s lawyer, said he could not explain the reasons why Port Authority would attempt to destabilize its own tenant. He said, “The Lord, and the government, work in mysterious ways.”

By: Sylvia Jamison

 

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