speciality hotels

RMS Queen Mary, Long Beach, California, United States

• The Library Hotel in New York City, is unique in that each of its ten floors is assigned one category from the Dewey Decimal System.
• The Burj al-Arab hotel in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, built on an artificial island, is structured in the shape of a boat’s sail.
• The Jailhotel Löwengraben in Lucerne, Switzerland is a converted prison now used as a hotel.
• The Luxor, a hotel and casino on the Las Vegas Strip in Paradise, Nevada, United States is unusual due to its pyramidal structure.
• The Liberty Hotel in Boston, used to be the Charles Street Jail.
• Built in Scotland and completed in 1936, The former ocean liner RMS Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, United States uses its first-class staterooms as a hotel, after retiring in 1967 from Transatlantic service.
• Throughout the world there are several hotels built from converted airliners.

Unique hotels

Treehouse hotels

Some hotels are built with living trees as structural elements, for example the Treehotel near Piteå, Sweden, the Costa Rica Tree House in the Gandoca-Manzanillo Wildlife Refuge, Costa Rica; the Treetops Hotel in Aberdare National Park, Kenya; the Ariau Towers near Manaus, Brazil, on the Rio Negro in the Amazon; and Bayram’s Tree Houses in Olympos, Turkey.

Straw bale hotels

In Nax Mont-Noble, a little ski resort situated on 1300 metres in the Swiss Alps, construction for the Maya Guesthouse started in October 2011. It will be the first hotel in Europe built entirely with straw bales. Due to the insulation values of the walls it will need no heating^[2]

Bunker hotels

The Null Stern Hotel in Teufen, Appenzellerland, Switzerland and the Concrete Mushrooms in Albania^[3] are former nuclear bunkers transformed into hotels.

Cave hotels

The Cuevas Pedro Antonio de Alarcón (named after the author) in Guadix, Spain, as well as several hotels in Cappadocia, Turkey, are notable for being built into natural cave formations, some with rooms underground. The Desert Cave Hotel in Coober Pedy, South Australia is built into the remains of an opal mine.

Capsule hotels

Capsule hotels are a type of economical hotel that are found in Japan, where people sleep in stacks of rectangular containers.

Igloo, Ice and snow hotels

The Ice Hotel in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden, and the Hotel de Glace in Duschenay, Canada, melt every spring and are rebuilt each winter; the Mammut Snow Hotel in Finland is located within the walls of the Kemi snow castle; and the Lainio Snow Hotel is part of a snow village near Ylläs, Finland.

Garden hotels

Garden hotels, famous for their gardens before they became hotels, include Gravetye Manor, the home of garden designer William Robinson, and Cliveden, designed by Charles Barry with a rose garden by Geoffrey Jellicoe.

Underwater hotels

Some hotels have accommodation underwater, such as Utter Inn in Lake Mälaren, Sweden. Hydropolis, project cancelled 2004 in Dubai, would have had suites on the bottom of the Persian Gulf, and Jules’ Undersea Lodge in Key Largo, Florida requires scuba diving to access its rooms.

Railway hotels

Frequently, expanding railway companies built grand hotels at their termini, such as the Midland Hotel, Manchester next to the former Manchester Central Station, and in London the ones above St Pancras railway station and Charing Cross railway station. London also has the Chiltern Court Hotel above Baker Street tube station; there are also Canada’s grand railway hotels. They are or were mostly, but not exclusively, used by those travelling by rail.

Motels

A motel (motor hotel) is a hotel which is for a short stay, usually for a night, for motorists on long journeys. It has direct access from the room to the vehicle (for example a central parking lot around which the buildings are set), and is built conveniently close to major roads and intersections.

World record setting hotels

Largest

See also: List of largest hotels in the world

In 2006, Guinness World Records listed the First World Hotel in Genting Highlands, Malaysia, as the world’s largest hotel with a total of 6,118 rooms. The Izmailovo Hotel in Moscow has the most rooms, with 7,500, followed by the Venetian Palazzo Complex in Las Vegas (7,117 rooms) and MGM Grand Las Vegas (6,852 rooms).

Oldest

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the oldest hotel in operation is the Hoshi Ryokan, in the Awazu Onsen area of Komatsu, Japan, which opened in the year 718.

Highest

The Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong claims to be the world’s highest hotel.^[6] It is located in the top floors of the International Commerce Centre in Hong Kong, at 484-metre (1,588 ft) above ground level.

Hotel rooms as an investment

Some hotels sell individual rooms to investors. Timeshare is an example of this kind of investment. The buyer is allowed to stay in the room without charge or at a reduced rate for a given number of days each year. The investor is paid a share of the takings for the room. Rooms can be sold on a leasehold basis, sometimes on a 999-year lease. Room owners are free to sell at any time.

Living in hotels

A number of public figures have notably chosen to take up semi-permanent or permanent residence in hotels.

• Fashion designer Coco Chanel lived in the Hotel Ritz Paris on and off for more than 30 years.
• Inventor Nikola Tesla lived the last ten years of his life at the New Yorker Hotel until he died in his room in 1943.
• Larry Fine (of the Three Stooges) and his family lived in hotels, due to his extravagant spending habits and his wife’s dislike for housekeeping. They first lived in the President Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where his daughter Phyllis was raised, then the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood. Not until the late 1940s did Larry buy a home in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles.
• General Douglas McArthur lived his last 14 years in the penthouse of the Waldorf Towers, a part of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
• Millionaire Howard Hughes lived in hotels during the last ten years of his life (1966-76), primarily in Las Vegas, as well as Acapulco, Beverly Hills, Boston, Freeport, London, Managua, Nassau, Vancouver, and others.
• Vladimir Nabokov and his wife Vera lived in the Montreux Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland (1961-his death in 1977).
• Actor Richard Harris lived at the Savoy Hotel while in London. Hotel archivist Susan Scott recounts an anecdote that, when he was being taken out of the building on a stretcher shortly before his death in 2002, he raised his hand and told the diners “it was the food.”
• Egyptian actor Ahmed Zaki lived his last 15 years in Ramses Hilton Hotel – Cairo.
• British entrepreneur Jack Lyons lived in the Hotel Mirador Kempinski in Switzerland for several years until his death in 2008.
• American actress Elaine Stritch lived in the Savoy Hotel in London for over a decade.

speciality hotels