Discover Les Trois Rois—a thousand year old Swiss hotel that continues to welcome guests today—or Rambagh Palace, a palatial hideaway first built as a sanctuary for the female consorts of the Maharaja of Jaiphur.
Read about hotels that have defied war and natural disaster, such as Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel—which survived the devastating Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923—or Hotel d’Angleterre, Copenhagen’s fairytale hotel which endured both post-war depression and Nazi occupation.
Rediscover the hotels that time forgot, including the original Waldorf=Astoria, now home to the Empire State Building, and the ill-fated El Rancho Vegas, Las Vegas’ first resort hotel. With the constantly transforming world of hotels, keep up to date with every detail, from unexpected ownership changes to lavish renovations.
As well as unique portraits of the hotels themselves, Great, Grand & Famous Hotels is a fascinating who’s who of history, featuring a host of entertaining cameos from industry titans as Cesar Ritz (“King of hoteliers and hotelier of kings”) and Oscar Tschirky (maître d’hôtel extraordinaire and creator of the Waldorf Salad) to such infamous guests as Oscar Wilde and Mata Hari, Ernest Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe. Discover which suite Coco Chanel called home for more forty years and the ballroom where Truman Capote is said to have thrown “The Party of the Century”.
