Legal issues could halt 'Paris Hilton Hotel' plans

We can imagine the commercials already: Paris Hilton invites you to bed down with her. It seems the socialite wants to go back into the family business now, she said recently. After having been a model, hosted her own reality show, cut an album, starred in film, designed her own clothes and launched her own perfumes, she feels the next step up on that ladder is to try her hand at being a hotelier. “I've pretty much done all you can do, but my next project that I'd like to do is get more involved in real estate,” she told Fox News. “It's always something I've been interested in. And right now that I've done everything I’ve wanted to do, that would definitely be the next step, to open my own hotels.” The blonde business-minded celebrity is the great-granddaughter of Conrad Hilton, the tycoon who founded the eponymous Hilton Hotels brand. She’d certainly need the hotel chain’s permission if she wanted to use her surname – as the recent Gucci feud has shown. Elisabetta Gucci, the great-granddaughter of Gucci Group founder Guccio Gucci, was earlier this year legally prevented for planning a group of hotels under her own name. The chain was to launch 40 properties around the world, including one flagship 87-room hotel in Dubai. And given that Hilton Hotels Corp was sold to The Blackstone Group for approximately $26 billion (Dh95.4bn) in 2007, the group might rather strenuously object to the use of the words Hilton and Hotel in the same sentence. If she should choose to go with her second name, Whitney, that wouldn't work either, because the Whitney Hotel has already been taken. So short of an agreement with the lads at the private equity firm, she’s going to have to go with Paris Hotels. Somehow, that doesn’t quite have the right ring to it. But even if she did get their go-ahead, just imagining the interiors of such a property makes our itty bitty heads spin. And really, would you really stay in a Paris Hilton Hotel?