2000s

Stone Town is inscribed by UNESCO, three years after a hotel put money into conserving two of its buildings

AIRE Ancient Baths opens in Spain

Anthony Lark leaves Aman after twelve years and five openings to join Montara Hospitality and design Trisara

Ananda opens in the Viceregal Palace of the Maharaja of Tehri Garhwal above Rishikesh

Rixos opens its first hotel in Turkey

Barceló launches Royal Hideaway

Banyan Tree launches Angsana as its second brand

Palazzo Versace opens on the Gold Coast — the first fashion-branded hotel in the world

The Bharat Hotels group launches The Lalit under Jyotsna Suri

Hospes opens its first Spanish house

Discovery Hospitality forms in the Philippines

VOIhotels forms as the Alpitour hotel arm

Royal Davui opens on a Fijian islet

SUJÁN begins in hospitality with Sher Bagh

Alberto Pinto’s studio takes its first aircraft commission

The Tswalu Foundation takes over the Dedeben Research Centre

Branson opens his own island home to buyout guests; Virgin Limited Edition begins

Ananda opens on the Tehri-Garhwal palace estate above Rishikesh, teaching Vedanta alongside the Ayurveda and defining the modern Indian destination spa

The Phoenicia reopens after a quarter of a century as a shell

Parsian assembles the country’s largest group out of what the foreign chains left behind

Étienne Dolfi, the shop's own supplier, takes over À la Mère de Famille

Ashok and Neelam Khanna open Ananda — India's first destination spa

Singita Sasakwa opens in the Grumeti, Tanzania

Jaisal Singh builds Sher Bagh at twenty — the first luxury tented camp in India

Count Benedikt Bolza begins restoring Castello di Reschio in Umbria; the hotel opens in 2021

Paul Canarelli opens Domaine de Murtoli on 2,500 hectares of southern Corsica

White Elephant opens on Nantucket harbour

Songtsam opens its first Tibetan lodge at Shangri-La, Yunnan

The Saxon opens in Johannesburg, where Mandela edited the Long Walk to Freedom

Alan Yau opens Hakkasan at Hanway Place in April

Flavio Briatore opens Twiga at Forte dei Marmi

Alexey Gorobiy opens Shambala on Kuznetsky Most

Marriott partners with Bulgari to create Bulgari Hotels & Resorts; the second house is announced for Bali

Walmart supplier offices in northwest Arkansas reach 445, having roughly doubled every two years

Cinq Mondes is founded in Paris on treatments gathered from five continents

Tivoli's Portuguese houses pass into Minor's ownership in 2016 after decades under Portuguese control

The Emiliano opens in São Paulo on Rua Oscar Freire

Jason Pomeranc's Sixty group opens 60 Thompson in New York

Jeanette Thottrup opens Borgo Santo Pietro in a thirteenth-century Tuscan farmhouse

Jean-Louis and Nathalie Poiroux open the first Cinq Mondes in Paris after eighteen months collecting rituals in a notebook

The Sumba Foundation is founded beside Nihiwatu

Gorobiy opens Shambala on Kuznetsky Most — the start of Moscow's glamour decade

The Ritz-Carlton opens at West Bay Lagoon

The Oberoi Amarvilas opens six hundred metres from the Taj Mahal, with a view of it from every room

Singita Lebombo opens in the Kruger with a design that rewrites the safari lodge

Minor launches Anantara, its first proprietary luxury brand

Alila opens its first resort in Bali

The Peninsula opens in Chicago, the group's first house in the American interior

The Fullerton opens in Singapore's 1928 General Post Office

Manfredi Lefebvre d'Ovidio becomes chairman of Silversea

Andrea Scherz takes the Gstaad Palace as the third generation

Rainer Becker and Arjun Waney open Zuma in Knightsbridge

Sketch opens on Conduit Street in December

Sol Kerzner launches One&Only from the Palmilla and Le Saint Géran

Azumi Restaurant Group is founded; Zuma, ROKA and Oblix follow

Roberto Cavalli opens his first café-store in Florence, then Just Cavalli at Torre Branca

The Ararat Park Hyatt opens in October, the first international house of the new period built rather than converted

The Jogye Order launches Templestay for the World Cup; 11,000 people sleep in temples during the tournament and on 2 July the programme is made permanent

The Oberoi Udaivilas opens — Biki Oberoi’s instruction was: we are building a palace

The World is launched — 165 apartments owned by their residents, who vote on where it goes

Alan Fuerstman founds Montage Hotels & Resorts

Longitude 131° opens facing Uluru, its tented pavilions raised off the sand

Three Camel Lodge opens in the Gobi, built by Mongolian craftsmen without nails

The Inn at Dos Brisas opens in Texas on a working organic farm

Robuchon opens L'Atelier in Tokyo — the counter as fine dining

Nammos opens on Psarou beach

Antonio Saladino develops the Borgo Egnazia project in Puglia

Starwood sells the four hotels, the Porto Cervo marina, the Pevero golf club and 6,000 acres to Colony Capital for €290m on 19 June

COMO Shambhala Estate opens outside Ubud

A fire tears through Souq Waqif, then in decline and under discussion for demolition ⚑ some accounts date the fire to 2006

25hours opens its first hotel in Hamburg

Paradisus launches as Meliá's all-inclusive resort line

Duetorrihotels forms around the Due Torri in Verona

Ori Kafri opens the first JK Place in Capri

Nammos opens on Psarou beach at Mykonos

James and Hayley Baillie open their first Australian lodge

The Mardavall opens on Mallorca's south-west coast

Blue Palace opens at Elounda facing Spinalonga

The Taleon Imperial opens in St Petersburg in the Eliseev mansion

Palazzo Manfredi opens facing the Colosseum

Vigilius opens above Lana, reachable only by cable car

Pestana takes over the management of Pousadas de Portugal — the state's historic-building network passes to a private operator

Two ifc completes at 412 metres; a tower deleted from the master plan gives Hong Kong a 1.3-hectare public park instead

Comlux is founded at Zürich

Roppongi Hills opens in Tokyo on 25 April, seventeen years after it was conceived

Michel Reybier opens La Réserve Geneva, designed by Jacques Garcia on the cues of African lodges

The Chedi Muscat opens — GHM and Jean-Michel Gathy — and luxury tourism in Oman begins with it; its minimalism is called a revolutionary concept for the Middle East

Four Seasons opens at Kingdom Centre in February on eleven floors of a ninety-nine-storey tower — the first Saudi luxury model with nothing to do with pilgrimage

The White City of Tel Aviv is inscribed by UNESCO — some four thousand International Style buildings, and the fabric the city’s hotels now occupy

Queen Mary 2 enters service, and remains the only ocean liner in scheduled transatlantic crossing

Lapin and Sergeev open the Japanese restaurant Ginza in St Petersburg

The Hiram Bingham begins running from Cusco to Machu Picchu

North Island opens in the Seychelles on a rehabilitated plantation

Oleg Deripaska's Basic Element begins the Sochi hotel developments

November: Ithaa is shipped from New Zealand via Singapore and lowered five metres onto the seabed at Rangali — installed, not yet open

Table Mountain is inscribed by UNESCO within the Cape Floral Region

Frank Marrenbach becomes general manager of Brenners Park-Hotel

Pansy Ho forms the MGM China joint venture in Macau

Trisara opens on Phuket's north-west coast — South East Asia's first all-pool-villa resort, thirty-nine villas and thirty sold privately

Brando dies; Tetiaroa closes to visitors and the atoll is left to its birds

The Setai opens at Miami Beach in a 1930s Art Deco tower, interiors by Jaya Ibrahim

The Qatari royal family funds a restoration that keeps the oldest buildings and demolishes everything built after 1950, using mangrove roofs, bamboo matted with clay and straw, and mud plaster

Hotel Indigo opens its first house in Atlanta

Alan Faena opens the Faena Hotel in Buenos Aires

Posadas launches Live Aqua at Cancún

SALA opens its first Thai house

Asilia Africa is founded in East Africa

Bill Bensley and Sokoun Chanpreda open Shinta Mani in Siem Reap

Casadelmar opens at Porto-Vecchio to a design by Jean-François Bodin

Bill & Coo opens above Megali Ammos at Mykonos

La Bastide de Gordes opens in the Luberon village

David Copperfield buys Musha Cay in the Bahamas

Porto Zante opens on Zakynthos

L'Andana opens in Tuscany on a Grand Ducal estate

Anthony Lark opens Trisara on Phuket, nine kilometres from Amanpuri

Article 121 of the UAE Constitution is amended and Federal Law No. 8 exempts DIFC from all federal civil and commercial law; the district opens with its own courts under English common law

Kempinski, Pan Pacific, Rydges and Wyndham found the Global Hotel Alliance on the model of the airline alliances, so that brands owning nothing in common could share one loyalty programme

Construction begins on The Pearl, a reclaimed archipelago on the historic pearl banks and the first freehold open to foreigners

The Hotel Moskva is demolished

Kamal Mouzawak founds Souk el Tayeb, the country’s first farmers’ market

The Deccan Odyssey begins running from Mumbai

Bulgari Residences launch alongside the hotels

Thomas Flohr founds VistaJet in Switzerland

Bulgari opens its first hotel in Milan with Ritz-Carlton

Madinat Jumeirah opens in Dubai, built as a reconstructed Arabian town

April: Ithaa opens, fourteen seats under the reef; the installation and the opening are five months apart and are two events

Riccardo Giraudi opens Beefbar in Monte-Carlo

Soho House takes over Cecconi's

Alain Ducasse buys Benoît and keeps it a bistro

Dermot Desmond takes Sandy Lane in Barbados with McManus and Magnier

The Dharmawangsa leaves Rosewood after eight years and becomes independent

Verba Mayr opens in Austria, applying the Mayr method commercially

Kamalaya opens on Koh Samui around a monk's cave, and codifies its programme

Carole Bamford opens the first Bamford Haybarn at Daylesford

AMResorts launches Secrets for adults-only all-inclusive resorts

Nordic Hotels & Resorts is formed in Sweden

Roberto Naldi assembles his Roman and Swiss houses into a collection

Core: Club opens at 66 East 55th Street, New York

John and Karina Stewart open Kamalaya on Koh Samui around a monk's cave

VIVAMAYR opens at Altaussee, taking the Mayr cure commercial

Abama opens on Tenerife to a design by Melvin Villarroel

Casa Angelina opens at Praiano on the Amalfi coast

Le Sereno opens on Grand Cul-de-Sac, St Barths

Qatar announces Lusail, to be finished by 2010 with 250,000 residents; the 2022 census counts 198,600

Andrew and Marit Miners begin the work at Misool that becomes its foundation

Raffles Holdings sells the entire chain to Colony Capital, Raffles Singapore included, on a 100-year lease

Giorgio Armani and Emaar sign for at least seven hotels and three resorts — the first partnership of the fashion house with a property developer

OMRAN is founded as the state’s executive arm for tourism development — the body behind most of what follows

Feynan Ecolodge opens in the Dana Biosphere Reserve: off-grid, owned by the conservation body and staffed by the local Bedouin community

Prince Alwaleed's Kingdom Holding buys the Savoy; Fairmont takes management

St. Regis Residences launch

Banyan Tree Residences launch

Horst Schulze founds Capella the day after retiring

HOSHINOYA launches with HOSHINOYA Karuizawa

Six Senses is established as a separate brand by the Shivdasanis

Emirates Palace opens in Abu Dhabi

The Resort at Paws Up opens on 37,000 acres in Montana — glamping enters American luxury

Steve Wynn opens Wynn Las Vegas, his first house under his own name

Core Club opens in New York as a members' club without a dress code or a golf course

The Ferragamo family opens Portrait Suites in Rome

Aapravasi Ghat is inscribed by UNESCO

The Nam Hai opens at Hoi An under GHM; Four Seasons takes it in 2016 — one building and two lineages, and the register keeps both dates

Blue Marlin opens at Cala Jondal — the VIP table on the sand

Franka Holtmann becomes the first woman to run Le Meurice

The Nam Hai opens at Hoi An, Jaya Ibrahim's Vietnamese house

Supplier offices reach 1,218; the hotel, restaurant and housing market of Bentonville is built on them

LVMH opens a hotel at Courchevel and names it after the winery — Cheval Blanc; its restaurant is called 1947, after the château's most famous vintage

Marqués de Riscal opens a hotel under Frank Gehry's titanium ribbons — the bodega becomes a house

ME by Meliá opens its first house

Beverly and Dereck Joubert found Great Plains Conservation

Tierra opens its first Chilean lodge in the Atacama

Beks Ndlovu founds African Bush Camps in Zimbabwe

Calivigny Island opens off Grenada

Nick Troubetzkoy opens Jade Mountain on St Lucia, its rooms open on one side

Colony Capital combines Fairmont, Raffles and Swissôtel into FRHI

Rezidor signs a worldwide licence with Missoni, aiming at thirty hotels in a decade

Dяgilev opens on the Shchukin stage in the Hermitage Garden

Dяgilev opens in spring on the Shchukin stage in the Hermitage Garden — a nightclub built as a theatre, with royal boxes over the dance floor and no beer at the bars

The restoration of Souq Waqif is completed for the Asian Games, saving the mud-brick market from demolition

The Badrutt family bequeaths two-thirds of the Palace to its director, Hans Wiedemann

The Hôtel du Cap accepts credit cards for the first time; televisions follow in 2012

Beverly and Dereck Joubert found Great Plains Conservation

Cheval Blanc opens its first Maison at Courchevel

Marqués de Riscal opens in Elciego under Frank Gehry's titanium ribbons

Melco Crown is formed by Lawrence Ho and James Packer for Macau

Sonia Cheng joins New World and begins building Rosewood into a global group

Grace Hotels opens its first house on Mykonos

Mark Birley sells the Birley clubs to Richard Caring in June; dies two months later

Langosteria opens on via Savona, Milan

Siniša Lazarević opens the first Freestyler splav on the Sava

La Petite Maison opens in London, taking the Niçoise model outward

Elewana forms in East Africa from a group of owner-run camps

Aitken Spence launches Heritance in Sri Lanka

Awasi opens at San Pedro de Atacama with a guide and vehicle per villa

The Augustine opens in Prague in a working Augustinian monastery

Ca' Sagredo opens in a fifteenth-century Venetian palace

John Phillips restores Borgo Finocchieto in Tuscany over eight years

Oscar Farinetti opens the first Eataly in a closed vermouth factory in Turin, with a cooking school inside the shop

Dorchester Collection is established

Regnum begins with the Carya Golf Club at Belek

Elements opens on 1 October over Kowloon Station — MTR keeps the rental and management rights to 78 per cent of it

Sharq Village opens beside the National Museum and the souq — the first branded luxury resort and spa in the country, built as a village rather than a tower

Aqua Expeditions launches river cruising on the Peruvian Amazon

Branson acquires Moskito Island beside Necker

Andaz launches in Liverpool Street, London

Explora opens on Rapa Nui, the most remote hotel in the Pacific

MGM Grand Macau opens on the peninsula

Cavo Tagoo opens above Mykonos town

Michel Reybier buys La Réserve Genève and begins the collection

Swire Hotels is founded in Hong Kong; The Opposite House opens in Beijing

Le Morne is inscribed by UNESCO

Bagatelle opens in the Meatpacking District

El Chiringuito opens at Es Cavallet

Neil Jacobs becomes chief executive of Six Senses

A Maryland jury finds Ritz-Carlton breached its duty to the owner of its Bali hotel by helping a competitor on the same island, and awards $10m in punitive damages

The court rules on 28 April that PT Karang Mas Sejahtera may terminate the Ritz-Carlton agreement

Hotel Bora Bora closes in October for a reconstruction that never happens

Four Seasons Bora Bora opens in September on Motu Tehotu with 100 overwater bungalows

Guerlain Spa opens, taking a perfume house into hotel treatment rooms

The Souq Waqif restoration completes, with the air-conditioning concealed and the parking put underground

Accor takes MGallery to market as a collection of character hotels

SLS opens in Beverly Hills under sbe

Serge Trigano and Philippe Starck open the first Mama Shelter in Paris

Emaar opens the first Address hotel in Dubai

Swire opens the Opposite House in Beijing and begins the House Collective

Alfredo Bataller Parietti opens SHA Wellness Clinic at Alicante

Alcide Leali opens the first Lefay resort on Lake Garda

The Connaught Bar opens, designed by David Collins

SUJÁN The Serai opens in the Great Thar Desert outside Jaisalmer

Sasaab opens above the Ewaso Nyiro in Samburu

Four Seasons opens in Florence in the Palazzo della Gherardesca with the largest private garden in the city

Aurelio opens at Lech

Isetan and Mitsukoshi combine; the younger house is named first

Le Palace reopens as a theatre

Dяgilev burns on 7 February; about 1,500 m² of the historic Shchukin stage is lost and nobody is killed — ⚑ the club had already been due to close that April

Dяgilev burns down on 7 February and is never rebuilt

RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 is retired to Port Rashid, Dubai, and becomes the second

Six Senses Zighy Bay opens in Musandam for 32 m Omani riyals, 82 villas of palm trunk, stone and mud, reached by a road cut to a village that boats had served for centuries

The Museum of Islamic Art opens, by I. M. Pei — the building with which Qatar made culture the reason to come

TWG Tea founded in Singapore by Bouqdib, Barnes, Murjani and Aum-Stievenard

Gérald Passédat takes the third star, held since

Alfredo Bataller Parietti opens SHA Wellness Clinic at Alicante

Esin Güral Argat diversifies Gürok Group into hospitality

The Oriental is renamed Mandarin Oriental, Bangkok

Dietrich Mateschitz opens Laucala Island in Fiji, bought from the Forbes family

Southern Ocean Lodge opens on Kangaroo Island; it burns in the 2020 bushfires and reopens in 2023

Zarafa Camp opens in the Selinda, Botswana

Sher Bagh joins Relais & Châteaux, the first tented property in India invited

Ian Schrager and Marriott launch EDITION

Robert De Niro opens the Greenwich Hotel in Tribeca

Atlantis The Palm opens in Dubai

Trump International opens its Las Vegas tower

CityCenter opens as a record-setting resort, residential and retail complex

The Upper House opens above Pacific Place in Hong Kong on 2 October — 117 rooms, and André Fu’s first hotel

Guesthouses are permitted on inhabited islands; on Maafushi the permission becomes the basis of local enterprise, and the resort island stops being the only way to be in the Maldives

The hotel drops the Ritz-Carlton name on 1 April and reopens as AYANA under Horst Schulze's West Paces Hotel Group

AYANA is named Asia's Leading Luxury Resort at the World Travel Awards, months after the rebrand

Co-founder Djoko Tjandra is convicted of corruption over the embezzlement of banking funds and flees the country the day before sentencing

Casa Tua opens as a members' club and hotel in Miami Beach

Givenchy Spa opens at La Réserve Ramatuelle

Private investors reopen San Miguel as a gourmet tapas market — the model of the market as a dining room, since copied worldwide

Missoni opens its first hotel in Edinburgh with Rezidor

Rodina opens at Sochi

Urban Resort Concepts opens The PuLi in Shanghai

Leo Ghitis opens Nayara at Arenal in Costa Rica

Finca Cortesin opens at Casares in Andalusia

Cap Rocat opens in a nineteenth-century Mallorcan fortress

Shinsegae Centum City in Busan passes Macy’s Herald Square as the largest department store in the world

Aras Agalarov opens Crocus City Hall, having paid to build the metro station that serves it

Hotel Missoni Edinburgh opens, the first of the two that were built

Raffles Makkah Palace opens three minutes from the Sacred Mosque — international brands begin operating in the Kingdom, and pilgrimage becomes a luxury market

Raffles Makkah Palace opens in November three minutes from the Sacred Mosque — pilgrimage becomes a luxury market

Indian Accent opens in March and makes modern Indian cooking a category

Jungsik opens in Seoul; the New York house follows in 2011 and takes two Michelin stars

The Upper House opens in Hong Kong, designed by André Fu

Amangiri opens in the Utah desert, built into the rock by Wendell Burnette, Rick Joy and Marwan Al-Sayed

Qasr Al Sarab opens in the Empty Quarter

Delaire Graff opens on the Helshoogte Pass, developed by Laurence Graff

Primland opens on 12,000 acres of the Blue Ridge, developed by Didier Primat

Yas Island opens in Abu Dhabi with the Yas Marina Circuit and the Yas Hotel