Every event

Ġgantija is raised on Gozo — older than the pyramids and older than Stonehenge, and the earliest thing in this register that people travelled to see

The King’s Highway is in use from Aqaba to Damascus — caravanserais, forts and towns strung along it because a traveller had to stop somewhere

The Taittiriya Upanishad instructs that the guest is god — the oldest written statement of a hospitality principle in this register

Darius builds the Royal Road from Susa to Sardis — 111 relay stations with stables, guards and provisions, and a courier covers in nine days what takes three months on foot

Khor Rori is founded as a fortified port on the frankincense route — a place that receives sailors, brokers, interpreters and envoys as well as cargo

Ashoka sets rest houses every eight kos along the road that becomes the Grand Trunk

The yi relay stations take shape under the Han — organised accommodation in China begins as a state function, for officials, envoys, documents and horses

Herod builds at Caesarea a deep-water harbour, an aqueduct and a city designed to receive Rome

Herod builds a spa on the shore of the Dead Sea — arguably the oldest documented wellness destination in this register

Aretas IV takes the Nabataean throne; under him Petra reaches its height and most of the water system is cut

Muziris trades pepper for Roman gold; a trader waits half a year for the monsoon to turn and is housed for the duration

The Nabataean towns of the Negev make a desert crossing survivable by engineering water and stopping places, and charge for them

The Silk Road opens under the Han — a network requiring a bed, water, fodder, security and a market at the end of every day’s march, for six thousand kilometres

Nalanda begins housing and feeding resident scholars from across Asia — lodging, learning, charity and worship in one institution, for seven centuries

The Tang capital at Chang’an holds the East and West Markets with guest quarters and caravan stations built into the city plan, receiving Persian, Arab, Indian and Byzantine merchants

The court begins sending embassies to Tang China — nineteen appointed, fourteen arrive, up to six hundred people each, sleeping in Tang post stations on the way

Caliph Uthman makes Jeddah the port for pilgrims to Mecca; the walled town that becomes Al Balad grows around the landing

Donggung and Wolji are laid out at Gyeongju — the Silla court’s banqueting complex, for feasts and the reception of important guests

Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan opens in Hayakawa — the oldest continuously operating lodging in the world

Fujiwara Mahito founds the Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan

The Zengorō Hōshi line begins at Awazu Onsen

Quseir Amra is built — a bath-house and lodge in the desert with no defensive or commercial purpose, and the earliest surviving building in this register put up purely to receive people in comfort

Guangzhou keeps permanent guest houses for Arab and Persian merchants — an early prototype of the international hotel, eight centuries before the word

The widow of Emperor Shōmu gives his possessions to the Shōsōin — Persian glass, Central Asian textiles, instruments from China and Korea

Zubaydah bint Ja’far endows the pilgrim road from Kufa to Mecca with wells, pools, dams, milestones, fire signals and rest houses over 1,300 km — the road takes her name

Al-Baleed flourishes at Salalah, its Chinese finds placing Oman on the Silk Road to the sea

The yeok stations take shape under Goryeo — horses, fodder and a bed for an official on the envoy road, and the state feeds movement rather than the merchant

Quanzhou becomes the Emporium of the World, its port linked to Muscat and Zanzibar

A hospice for Christian pilgrims is established at the Muristan in Jerusalem

The Hospital of St John is formally recognised; the Hospitallers become an order — hospitality organised as an international institution of care

The Gothic, German and Danish yards stand at Novgorod — walled compounds holding market, warehouse and bed at once, where a foreign merchant was required to trade and forbidden to trade anywhere else

Robat Sharaf is built on the Mashhad road — a Seljuk caravanserai four centuries before Shah Abbas

The Hospitallers rebuild at Akko: fortress, hospital, church and hospice together, and the Knights’ Halls survive

Meat stalls are first documented on the Pla de la Boqueria, on the Rambla outside the Barcelona walls

Ashford Castle is built by the de Burgos; the Guinness family holds it from 1852 and it becomes a hotel in 1939

The yam takes hold as a post station a day’s ride apart, where a courier is owed horses and a bed by law rather than by trade — some three hundred of them, outlasting every imperial hotel in this register

The Frescobaldi are recorded in the Florentine wine trade

Khan el-Khalili is established in Fatimid Cairo and becomes the trading heart of the medieval city

Jarkas el-Khalili founds the khan at Cairo that becomes a quarter and keeps its name

Giovanni di Piero Antinori joins the Arte Fiorentina dei Vinattieri — the Antinori wine business begins

The khans of Tripoli take their Mamluk form — a protected courtyard where merchant, animal and cargo entered together, traded and stayed

The Goldener Hirsch is first recorded at Salzburg — among the oldest hotel buildings in Europe

Namdaemun opens its shops under King Taejong

Villa San Michele is built at Fiesole, its façade attributed to Michelangelo

Schloss Fuschl is built as a hunting lodge for the archbishops of Salzburg

Mehmet II orders a covered cloth market built at Constantinople to fund the Hagia Sophia; the Cevahir Bedesten is finished by 1461

Souq al-Madina at Aleppo reaches its extent — thirteen kilometres of covered market on the Silk Road ⚑ the fabric is medieval and its dating is approximate

Wikala al-Ghuri is built — storage below, cells above, a single guarded gate

Wikala al-Ghuri is completed — storage below, modular merchant lodgings above, with a mosque, madrasa, fountain and school around it

The wall of Jeddah holds against a Portuguese siege

The Order of St John is given Malta, carrying to the island the hospice tradition it began in Jerusalem in 1113

The Knights land at Birgu on the Grand Harbour, thirty-six years before Valletta exists

Sher Shah Suri begins building up to 1,700 sarais from Bengal to the Punjab, with trees and wells between them

The Muscovy Company is granted a court on Varvarka — chambers that are dwelling, warehouse and embassy at once, and the earliest surviving building in Moscow where a foreigner was housed by charter

Haji Begum builds the Arab Sarai at Delhi for the three hundred Arab clerics who accompanied her on hajj

Valletta is founded by Jean Parisot de Valette after the Great Siege and laid out by Girolamo Cassar — a capital planned and built in one campaign by an order of hospitallers

Cardinal Tolomeo Gallio builds the Villa d'Este at Cernobbio; it becomes a hotel in 1873

The Sacra Infermeria opens, its Great Ward among the longest rooms in Europe and its patients served on silver

La Tour d'Argent dates its founding — the house's own claim, undocumented

The Monasterio is built as a seminary at Cusco; it opens as a hotel in 1995

Shah Abbas moves the capital to Isfahan and begins the caravanserai network that gives the type its name

Ieyasu fixes the five highways; the Tōkaidō runs fifty-three stations, each required to keep a hundred porters and a hundred horses

Isfahan is laid out around Meidan Emam, joined to a two-kilometre bazaar through the Qeyssariyeh portal, with Ali Qapu as the place from which the shah receives his guests

The Stanglwirt is first recorded at Going am Wilden Kaiser; the Hauser family holds it still

Nishiki is granted rights as a fish wholesale market in Kyoto ⚑ trade on the street is recorded from the fourteenth century

The Santa Clara convent is founded at Cartagena; it opens as a hotel in 1995

The Marché des Enfants Rouges opens in the Marais — the oldest covered market in Paris

Dejima is completed at Nagasaki — the artificial island on which foreign traders are confined for two centuries

Coffee begins to be sold commercially in Venice

La Posta Vecchia is built at Ladispoli; J. Paul Getty restores it as his home in 1960

Chandni Chowk is laid out at Shahjahanabad to a design by Jahanara Begum, daughter of Shah Jahan

Jachiam Bütz-Janzun builds the Chesa Veglia farmhouse in St. Moritz

Cliveden is built for the Duke of Buckingham; it becomes a hotel in 1985

The Gostiny Dvor at Arkhangelsk is begun in stone, finished 1683 — administrative, commercial and defensive in one wall

Mitsui Takatoshi opens Echigoya on the busiest merchant street in Edo, in a rented shopfront a ken and a half wide

Mitsui Takatoshi opens Echigoya in Edo, selling cash at fixed prices and cloth by the length

Villa Cetinale is built near Siena; it is let whole from 2000

Les Trois Rois opens at Basel on the Rhine — among the oldest city hotels in Europe

Louis XIV takes Charles Dalloyau from the Prince de Condé as officier de bouche

Fire moves Echigoya to Surugachō and Takatoshi announces 現銀掛値なし — cash on the counter, one price for everyone. The fixed price, 169 years before Le Bon Marché

Procopio Cutò opens Le Procope — the first house in France to call itself a café

The Madar-e Shah caravanserai is endowed at Isfahan by the mother of the last Safavid shah

A shop is first recorded on Dienerstrasse, Munich — the origin of Dallmayr

The Pupp begins at Karlsbad; the present hotel carries the name from 1775

The Taschenberg Palace is built at Dresden for Augustus the Strong's mistress; it opens as a hotel in 1995

William Fortnum and Hugh Mason open a grocery in St James's Market

The Tawaraya opens in Kyoto; eleven generations of one family have run it

The first roadside inn of the postal service is built at St Petersburg — the date the Russian hotel trade takes as its own beginning

Peter I decrees the establishment of inns and gostiny dvory — ⚑ Russia regulated lodging before it had restaurants, which is the reverse of every other country in this register

Caffè Florian opens on the Piazza San Marco

The building that becomes Le Yaca is raised in the old village of Saint-Tropez

Stohrer opens on rue Montorgueil

Nicolas Ruinart writes in his ledger on 1 September that he is starting a business in wine with bubbles — the first champagne house

Rajmahal is built at Jaipur; it remains the only Pink City hotel still owned by the Maharaja

Hoshi Ryokan — recorded founding

Nicolas Stohrer opens on rue Montorgueil, bringing pastry, wafers, gingerbread and sugar work under one roof

Caffè Gilli opens on via Calzaioli, Florence

Jacques Fourneaux founds the house that becomes Taittinger

Fortnum & Mason claims the invention of the Scotch egg

Moët is founded at Épernay

The Lake Palace is built on Jag Niwas island by Maharana Jagat Singh II

Hotel D'Angleterre begins in Copenhagen on Kongens Nytorv

Borough Market moves to its present site off Borough High Street ⚑ trade on the site is documented from the twelfth century

The Canton System confines foreign trade to the Thirteen Factories at Guangzhou — merchants work and live inside a quarter they may not leave

Louis XV commissions Ange-Jacques Gabriel to build twin palaces on the Place de la Concorde

Al Zubarah is founded on the pearl trade — courtyard houses, harbour works and a fort over the wells

Antico Caffè Greco opens on the via dei Condotti — the only café of its day admitting women

Pierre-Jean Bernard opens Maison Bernard on the rue du Faubourg Montmartre

Giuseppe Dentis opens Al Bicerin facing the Consolata; the bicerin follows

A. Boulanger opens in Paris — by tradition the first 'restaurant', a menu at individual tables

Lapérouse opens on the quai des Grands-Augustins

Ruinart buys the crayères beneath Reims — chalk quarries dug in Roman times, later listed and UNESCO-inscribed

The house that becomes Veuve Clicquot is founded; Madame Clicquot takes it in 1805 at twenty-seven

Victor Louis builds the Grand Hôtel opposite his own opera house at Bordeaux

Sulpice Debauve mixes Marie-Antoinette's medicine into cocoa and presses the first solid chocolate

Abdel Hamid Pasha builds the Al-Hamidiyah souq along the Roman decumanus that once led to the Temple of Jupiter

Bedouin traders gather to sell standing on the Wadi Musheireb; the market that names itself for it becomes the origin of Doha ⚑ Qatari historians give about 250 years

Antoine Beauvilliers opens La Grande Taverne de Londres — the first grand restaurant

Ludwig Dehne opens a confiserie on the Michaelerplatz to supply the Hofburgtheater

Seteais is built at Sintra; it opens as a hotel in 1955

The Revolution abolishes the guilds; the aristocracy's chefs open their own houses and the restaurant boom begins

The Finkbeiner family begins at Baiersbronn; the Traube Tonbach grows from the inn

Doyen begins trading on the Champs-Élysées; the pavilion built 1842 by Hittorff

Heiligendamm opens as the first seaside resort on the German Baltic

Louis XVI is guillotined on the square in front of the future Crillon

The City Hotel opens on Broadway — the first building in America erected to be a hotel, 73 rooms

Thomas Rule opens Rules as an oyster bar — five owners in the 228 years since

Debauve opens his chocolate house on the Rive Gauche

Jean-Baptiste Dalloyau opens the first Maison de gastronomie and invents food to take away

The Breidenbacher Hof opens in Düsseldorf

A widowed descendant renames the shop À la Mère de Famille

The Sanoner family begins at Ortisei; ADLER grows from the inn

Les Deux Magots begins as a novelty and fabric shop named after a play

The Nassauer Hof opens at Wiesbaden beside the springs

The Hotel de Russie opens on the Via del Babuino, its garden laid out by Valadier

Antonio Cova opens a literary café beside La Scala

Percier and Fontaine build the shop at 30 rue des Saints-Pères; royal warrant granted

Antoine-Étienne Dalloyau opens the first Parisian tea room

The Danieli opens in the Palazzo Dandolo, a fourteenth-century house on the Riva

The Promenadenhaus at Baden-Baden is rebuilt as the Kurhaus by Friedrich Weinbrenner, with a casino inside it from the start

Angelo Marchesi opens his pasticceria on via Santa Maria alla Porta, Milan

Weinbrenner's Kurhaus opens at Baden-Baden with a gaming room inside it

Tranquille Yard opens his restaurant on Kuznetsky Most — Yar, the oldest restaurant name in the country

Tremont House opens in Boston on 16 October, by Isaiah Rogers — indoor plumbing, indoor baths and lavatories, a reception area, locked single rooms, free soap and bellboys. The specification of the modern hotel, sixty years before the Savoy

Villa Sant'Andrea is built at Taormina by an English family; it opens as a hotel in 1950

Nadaya Mansuke opens the parent restaurant of Nadaman in Osaka

Iida Shinshichi opens Takashimaya in Kyoto, dealing in used clothing and cotton

Iida Shinshichi opens Takashimaya in Kyoto on 10 January

Jean-Jacques Ducasse buys vineyard parcels from Château Figeac; the land becomes Château Cheval Blanc

Jean-Jacques Ducasse buys vineyard parcels from Château Figeac; the land becomes Cheval Blanc

Adare Manor is begun by the Earl of Dunraven; it opens as a hotel in 1988

Augustus Smith takes the lease of the Isles of Scilly and begins rebuilding Tresco

Des Bergues opens in Geneva, often called the first purpose-built luxury hotel in Europe

Charles-Augustin Meurice opens Le Meurice on the rue de Rivoli — the first Paris palace hotel

Rambagh is built at Jaipur as a garden house for the queen's handmaiden; it becomes the maharaja's residence

Auckland orders a dak bungalow every ten to fifteen miles on the main roads

France bans gambling; the players cross to Baden-Baden and the Kurhaus becomes famous

David Sprüngli founds David Sprüngli & Son in Zurich

James Brown, valet to Lord Byron, opens Brown's in Mayfair

Jacques Bénazet takes the Baden-Baden concession and introduces roulette

The Oberoi Grand opens in Calcutta on Chowringhee

Samuel Cunard founds the line that invents the scheduled ocean crossing — a passage becomes a timetable

The Auckland Hotel opens at Calcutta on 19 November out of David Wilson’s bakery; it becomes the Great Eastern

Shepheard’s opens at Cairo; for a century its terrace is where the imperial world meets

The Bayerischer Hof opens in Munich at Ludwig I's wish for a hotel fit for guests of the court

The Baur au Lac opens on the lake at Zurich

The Quisisana opens at Capri as a sanatorium; it becomes a hotel in 1861

The Astor House opens in Shanghai, the first Western-style hotel in China, bringing the country its first electric light, telephone and film screening

Édouard Bénazet succeeds his father and decides a casino should not be only gambling — the integrated resort, proposed

The Venetian rising: Florian's rooms are turned into an infirmary for the wounded

The Kronenhof opens at Pontresina

The Pizzinini family begins at San Cassiano; Rosa Alpina grows from the inn

Lane Crawford opens in Hong Kong with a tailor, a baker, a wine merchant, an auctioneer, a restaurant and a bar

Lane Crawford opens in Hong Kong

Scott's opens as an oyster warehouse in Coventry Street

Aristide Boucicaut becomes a partner at Le Bon Marché and replaces haggling with fixed prices, refunds and a reading room

Aristide Boucicaut opens Le Bon Marché — fixed prices, low margins, goods on open display

The Mont Cervin opens at Zermatt, one of the first hotels of the high Alps

The Villa Serbelloni opens as a hotel at Bellagio

The Pereire brothers buy the ground north of the boulevard des Capucines, meaning to build a luxury quarter connected to the railway stations they own

Henri and Édouard Mariage found their tea house in Paris on 1 June

Alexander Seiler takes the Monte Rosa at Zermatt and begins the Seiler dynasty

Napoleon III builds the Villa Eugénie at Biarritz for the Empress; it becomes the Hôtel du Palais in 1893

Queen Victoria stays at Le Meurice on her state visit to Paris

Johannes Badrutt takes the twelve-bed Pension Faller and makes it the Engadiner Kulm

The Europejski opens in Warsaw — the oldest hotel in the city

Jesuits found Château Ksara in the Bekaa — the oldest winery in the country

August Dehne sells the confiserie to his apprentice Christoph Demel

Pommery is founded at Reims; its cellars later become an exhibition space for contemporary art

Marqués de Riscal is founded in Rioja Alavesa

The Vier Jahreszeiten opens in Munich at the wish of Maximilian II

Baratti and Milano open their confectionery on via Dora Grossa, Turin

Jean Touan opens Café Tortoni in Buenos Aires, named for the Paris café

Florian is restored into the six rooms that stand today

Haussmann’s decree of 29 September fixes rectilinear, uniform façades on the new streets around the Opéra — the frontage the grand hotel needs to exist

The Satow family takes Hiiragiya in Kyoto

The Beau-Rivage opens at Ouchy, Lausanne

Le Grand Hôtel is inaugurated by Empress Eugénie on 5 May with 800 rooms and 45 salons, built in fourteen months; Café de la Paix opens with it on 30 June

Louis-Ernest Ladurée opens on rue Royale; Jeanne Souchard later invents the tea room

Le Grand Hôtel opens beside the Paris Opéra, built for the Second Empire

François Blanc takes over the Monte-Carlo casino concession

Société des Bains de Mer created by sovereign order of Charles III on 2 February

The Casino de Monte-Carlo opens on 1 June on the Plateau des Spélugues

The Arts Club founded on Dover Street by Dickens, Trollope and Lord Leighton

The Excelsior Hotel Ernst opens in Cologne facing the cathedral

Princess Caroline brings the Blancs to Monaco and writes the rule barring Monégasques from the gaming rooms

The Austrian Pilgrim Hospice opens on the Via Dolorosa; it is still a working pilgrim guesthouse

A guesthouse called the Oriental is recorded on the Chao Phraya, run by two Americans

The Galle Face opens at Colombo — among the oldest hotels east of Suez

Marie Blanc builds the Hôtel de Paris with her husband, and is named a co-founder in the company record

Yakov Pegov and the French cook Lucien Olivier open the Hermitage — a restaurant, a hotel and a bathhouse in one complex, and the room in which the salad was invented

The Hôtel de Paris opens in Monte-Carlo, built by the Société des Bains de Mer

The Victoria opens at Interlaken; it merges with the Jungfrau in 1899

Jules Jaluzot opens Printemps on the boulevard Haussmann

Fire destroys seventy buildings along the Bangkok riverfront, including the Oriental

The Langham opens as the largest and most modern hotel in London

The Langham opens as the largest and most modern hotel in London

The Beau-Rivage opens on the Geneva lakefront

Villa Cora is built in Florence for Baron Oppenheim

Eduard Sacher opens a delicatessen behind the Kärntnertor theatre, the beginning of the Sacher business

The Sacher opens at Salzburg on the Salzach

The Hongkong Hotel Company is founded; it becomes The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels in 1923

The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels is incorporated — sixty-two years before the Peninsula opens

The Amstel opens in Amsterdam on the river

The Quellenhof opens at Bad Ragaz above the Tamina gorge

Watson’s opens in Bombay, cast iron and closed to Indians

The Suez Canal opens in November, and Thomas Cook runs his first Nile steamers Cairo to Aswan at a fixed price — the package tour is proved in Egypt

Khedive Ismail builds the Gezira Palace to receive the guests of the Suez Canal opening

Hippolyte de Villemessant of Le Figaro builds the Villa Soleil at Cap d'Antibes as a retreat for writers

The Grand Hotel National opens at Lucerne; César Ritz manages it from 1878

The Grand Hotel Wien opens on the Ringstrasse

Glenapp Castle is built in Ayrshire; it opens as a hotel in 2000

Ernest Cognacq opens La Samaritaine by the Pont Neuf

The Grand Hôtel du Cap is inaugurated in February with a fifteen-course dinner for a hundred guests

Savva Mamontov acquires Abramtsevo and makes it a colony for Russian artists

Crawford Market opens in Bombay in Norman and Flemish stone; its fountain is designed by Lockwood Kipling, father of Rudyard

Çırağan Palace is completed on the Bosphorus for Sultan Abdülaziz

Omar Nasseef Effendi, governor and merchant, begins Bayt Nassif on Souq Al Alawi; it is finished in 1881

The Mercado Central opens in Santiago, its iron frame prefabricated in England and shipped out

Brenners Park-Hotel opens at Baden-Baden; the Oetker family buys it in 1941 and builds the collection around it

Brenners Park-Hotel opens at Baden-Baden on the Lichtentaler Allee

The Eden Roc opens at Ascona on Lake Maggiore

The original Procope closes; the premises pass through a club and a restaurant

Zenichiro Kanaya opens a samurai house to foreign guests at Nikko

The Palais Hansen is built by Theophil Hansen for the Vienna World Exhibition; it opens as a hotel in 2013

Zenichiro Kanaya opens a samurai house at Nikko to foreign guests

Franz Landtmann opens his café on the Ringstrasse on 1 October

The Grand Hotel Timeo opens at Taormina below the Greek theatre

The Midland Grand opens at St Pancras, by George Gilbert Scott

The Imperial opens in Vienna for the World Exhibition, converted from a prince's palace

The Bürgenstock resort begins above Lake Lucerne

Giuseppe Mengoni's iron-and-glass Mercato Centrale opens at San Lorenzo, Florence

Printemps installs an iron bridge between its buildings and two lifts

Franz Joseph I appoints Demel Purveyor to the Imperial and Royal Court

The Grande Bretagne becomes a hotel on Syntagma Square

The Grand Hôtel opens in Stockholm on Blasieholmen

Le Richemond opens in Geneva under the Armleder family

The Palace opens in San Francisco; it is rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake and fire

The Grand Hotel Europe opens on 28 January at the corner of Nevsky and Mikhailovskaya — the first luxury house in Russia

Franz Xaver Mayr born at Gröbming, Styria, on 28 November

The Grand Hotel Europe opens on Nevsky Prospect

Caffè Gilli moves to its present Florence address

Café Central opens in the Palais Ferstel

Maupassant describes the Sube in Sur l'eau, calling it the Hôtel du Bailli de Suffren

The Oriental Bangkok dates its founding — a date set by the board in 1976 to permit a centenary

Eduard Sacher opens the Sacher opposite the Vienna opera

The Park Hyatt Paris-Vendôme building rises on the rue de la Paix; it opens as a hotel in 2002

Sennosuke Yamaguchi opens the Fujiya at Hakone

The Fujiya Hotel is founded at Hakone for foreign guests

The Fujiya opens at Hakone, one of the first Western-style hotels in Japan

The Kulm installs the first electric light in Switzerland

Charles Garnier's Salle Garnier opens on 25 January; Sarah Bernhardt performs

The Zermatterhof opens, built by the commune of Zermatt itself

Villa Crespi is built at Orta in Moorish style for a cotton merchant

Jacob Ronacher opens Café Ronacher, renamed Sperl within the year

The Bauer opens in Venice under Julius Grünwald

Hans Niels Andersen, aged 29, buys the Oriental and rebuilds it as the first luxury hotel in Siam

Hotel Des Indes opens in The Hague, converted from a nobleman's residence

The Villard Houses are built on Madison Avenue; the Palace hotel rises behind them in 1980

The Windsor opens in Melbourne, the oldest grand hotel in Australia

The Great Eastern becomes the first hotel in India with electric light

Incheon opens as a treaty port; foreign residence and shipping make the ports laboratories for Western hotel service

Franz Peck opens a Prague-style salumeria on via Orefici, Milan

The first Orient Express leaves Paris for Constantinople on 4 October

Café Landtmann opens in Vienna

A fire destroys much of Al-Hamidiyah; the rebuilding under Abdul Hamid II adds the iron vault that still roofs it

The Riffelalp opens above Zermatt at 2,222 metres, with Europe's highest tramway

Kavárna Slavia opens opposite the new National Theatre on 30 August

Tigran Sarkies opens the Eastern Hotel in Penang on 15 April

Tigran Sarkies opens the Eastern in Penang on 15 April, aged twenty-three

The Cecil opens at Simla, the summer capital of British India

The Hassler opens at the top of the Spanish Steps; the Wirth family holds it still

Les Deux Magots becomes a café, keeping the name and the two Chinese figures

Dunton is founded as a mining camp in Colorado; it reopens as a hotel in 2001

The Canadian Pacific begins its chain of railway hotels across the Dominion

Isetan opens in Tokyo

Canadian Pacific begins operating hotels along its railway lines; the department becomes Fairmont

Auguste Fauchon opens his fine-foods shop on the place de la Madeleine

Mena House opens at Giza, the first hotel in Egypt with electricity, facing the Great Pyramid

Fortnum's becomes the first shop in Britain to stock Heinz baked beans

Isetan opens in Kanda, Tokyo

The Winter Palace opens at Luxor for travellers up the Nile

Sénéquier opens on the Quai Jean-Jaurès

The Sarkies brothers open Raffles on 1 December with ten rooms

The Cardu and Rossi building opens in May — today the Oriental's Authors' Wing

The Sarkies brothers open Raffles in Singapore

Hotel Kämp opens in Helsinki on the Esplanade

The Grand Hotel opens on Mackinac Island with the longest porch in the world

Café Gijón opens on the Paseo de Recoletos, Madrid, on 15 May

Christophersen designs a new Avenida de Mayo façade for Tortoni; its back becomes its front

The Hotel del Coronado opens on the beach south of San Diego

The Banff Springs opens, built by the Canadian Pacific Railway

The Savoy opens under Richard D'Oyly Carte — Britain's first luxury hotel: electric light throughout, electric lifts, private bathrooms

César Ritz arrives at the Savoy in August and brings Auguste Escoffier (LHL-P-005) with him

The Dresdner Bank headquarters is built on Bebelplatz; it opens as the Hotel de Rome in 2006

The Eden opens in Rome above the Spanish Steps

The Métropole opens at Monte-Carlo on the gardens

The Eastern and the Oriental merge in Penang as the Eastern & Oriental

Antoine Sella opens the Grand Hôtel du Cap as a hotel, having bought it in 1887

Hotel Jerome opens at Aspen during the silver boom

Le Voltaire opens on the quai, in the house where Voltaire died

The Imperial Hotel opens in Tokyo; Frank Lloyd Wright's building follows in 1923

The Imperial Hotel opens at Hibiya on 3 November as the guesthouse of Japan

Peck becomes official supplier to the Italian Crown

Sir Donald Currie of the Union-Castle line buys the Cape Town land to build a hotel for his own passengers

Chateau Lake Louise opens as a one-storey chalet, built by the Canadian Pacific

The Imperial Hotel opens in Tokyo; Frank Lloyd Wright's building follows in 1923

Augusta Victoria sails from Cuxhaven on 22 January for a fifty-seven-night Mediterranean voyage — the first pleasure cruise, conceived by Albert Ballin of HAPAG

Reid's Palace opens on the cliffs at Funchal, built by William Reid

The Bristol opens in Vienna opposite the opera

The Saint James is built in Paris as a foundation for scholars; it becomes a hotel in 1986

Louis Thomas Leonowens, son of Anna Leonowens, becomes proprietor of the Oriental

Pera Palace opens in Constantinople for passengers off the Orient Express

Villa Feltrinelli is built at Gargnano; Mussolini is held there in 1943

Anna Sacher takes the hotel after her husband's death and runs it for thirty-eight years

Café Sperl — the Vienna room that never modernised

The Waldorf opens on Fifth Avenue; the Astoria joins it in 1897 — the tall-building hotel, thirteen and sixteen floors

The American Bar opens at the Savoy — the oldest surviving cocktail bar in Britain

The Savoy opens in Florence on the Piazza della Repubblica

Bader and Kahn open a 70 m² shop on the rue La Fayette

The Caruso opens at Ravello in the eleventh-century Palazzo d'Afflitto

Schloss Friedrichshof is completed for Empress Victoria at Kronberg

San Ysidro Ranch opens at Montecito; Kennedy honeymoons there and Olivier marries Leigh there

Ritz opens Le Grand-Hôtel in Rome on 11 January — the first hotel in the world with a private bathroom in every room

An earthquake collapses much of the Grand Bazaar; the rebuilding changes its architecture permanently

Villa Rothschild is built at Königstein for Wilhelm Carl von Rothschild

The New York Palace opens in Budapest as an insurance building with the Café New York below

Santo Mauro is built in Madrid for the Duke of Santo Mauro; it becomes a hotel in 1991

César Ritz opens Le Grand-Hôtel in Rome on 11 January — reportedly the first hotel with a private bathroom in every room

Falaknuma is completed at Hyderabad and later passes to the Nizam

Tremont House razed

Ritz and Escoffier form the Ritz Hotel Development Company while still employed by the Savoy

The Hermitage opens at Monte-Carlo, its winter garden by Gustave Eiffel

The Royal opens in Budapest for the millennium of Hungary

Caspar Badrutt opens Badrutt's Palace in St. Moritz on 29 July, architects Chiodera and Tschudi

The Breakers opens at Palm Beach, built by Henry Flagler beside his railway

Castle Hot Springs opens in Arizona, the state's first resort, reached by stagecoach

Both are dismissed from the Savoy over missing wine and spirits

The Volkhardt family takes the Bayerischer Hof in Munich

The Nagycsarnok opens in Budapest on 15 March, commissioned by the mayor and built by Samu Pecz to replace the open markets — and is attacked at once because prices rose

Friedrich Haerlin buys the Hamburg house that becomes the Vier Jahreszeiten

The Amsterdam bank building opens; it becomes the Sweelinck conservatory and then the Conservatorium hotel in 2011

Ritz and Escoffier buy the Hôtel de Gramont and Hôtel Crozat on the Place Vendôme

John Jacob Astor IV opens the taller Astoria next door; Peacock Alley joins them

The Berkeley opens at Piccadilly; it moves to Knightsbridge in 1972

The Hotelbetriebs-Aktiengesellschaft is founded in Berlin; Kempinski takes its name in 1953

The Ritz Paris opens on the Place Vendôme

The Balchug opens in Moscow facing the Kremlin across the river

Arthur Million expands Le Meurice; a stray greyhound becomes the house emblem

Claridge's is rebuilt by the D'Oyly Carte company and reopens

Ritz and Escoffier take the Carlton, London

The Old Cataract opens at Aswan for Thomas Cook's Nile passengers

Louis Fouquet opens a coachman's bar at the Champs-Élysées; the hotel follows in 2006

The Lido Palace opens at Riva del Garda

HAPAG commissions Blohm & Voss to build the Prinzessin Victoria Luise, the first ship in history built as a cruise ship and nothing else

Thomas Cook builds the Cataract at Aswan for his own passengers

The Raffles main building opens on 18 November with 102 rooms and a 500-seat dining salon

The Mount Nelson opens on 6 March — the first hotel in South Africa with hot and cold running water

The Mount Nelson becomes the unofficial British headquarters of the Second Boer War; Churchill reports from it

The Dolder Grand opens above Zurich as a curhouse

The Michelin Guide is first published — free, with travel tips and listings

The Continental opens in Oslo; the Brochmann family holds it still

The Teutonia Club opens in Singapore; it becomes the Goodwood Park hotel in 1929

Villa Cortine opens at Sirmione on Lake Garda

Mitsukoshi abolishes the zauri system and turns Nihonbashi into display space

Therese Randlkofer's Dallmayr is appointed Purveyor to the Court

Villa Igiea is built at Palermo for the Florio family by Ernesto Basile

The Fustinoni family takes the Villa Serbelloni at Bellagio

Statler builds a temporary 2,100-room hotel of wood at the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition and is one of the few vendors to make a profit

Le Train Bleu opens inside the Gare de Lyon for the Exposition Universelle of 1900

Ver-o-Peso opens at Belém on the site of a 1625 weighing house, where the Amazon meets the Atlantic trade

The Bristol opens in Warsaw, part-owned by Ignacy Jan Paderewski

The Excelsior Palace opens at Rapallo on the Ligurian coast

The Cristallo opens at Cortina d'Ampezzo

Mayr takes his doctorate summa cum laude and formulates the Mayr cure

The Metropole opens in Hanoi, the first grand hotel of French Indochina

The Sarkies brothers open the Strand in Rangoon

The Moana opens at Waikiki, the first hotel on the beach

The Splendido opens at Portofino in a sixteenth-century monastery

La Guérite — the house's claim; other sources 1935

The Balmoral opens at Edinburgh Waverley as the North British Station Hotel

The American Colony opens in Jerusalem in a pasha's house

William Neatby tiles the Harrods meat hall for Doulton in nine weeks; a Viennese art journal compares it to a church

The pasha’s house on the Nablus road, bought by a religious community from Chicago, opens as the American Colony Hotel

The Sontag Hotel opens at Jeongdong, built with state funds for Antoinette Sontag on land given by Emperor Gojong — the first hotel coffee in Korea is served here

Harrods opens its food halls, tiled by W. J. Neatby

The Mount Washington opens in the White Mountains

Escoffier publishes Le Guide Culinaire, codifying cuisine classique and the kitchen brigade

Ada Coleman becomes head bartender of the American Bar, holding the post until 1926

The Park Hotel opens at Vitznau on Lake Lucerne

The Hotel National takes its first guests, built the year before to Alexander Ivanov’s design

Antoine Rumpelmayer opens Angelina on the rue de Rivoli

Mayr is appointed head of the Johannisbrunn hydropathic clinic

The Taj Mahal Palace opens on 16 December to seventeen guests, unfinished

The National opens opposite the Kremlin

Jamsetji Tata opens the Taj Mahal Palace at Apollo Bunder

Statler builds the Inside Inn at the St Louis exposition — 2,257 rooms, the largest hotel in the world, dismantled and sold for scrap afterwards

Le Mirador opens above Lake Geneva at Le Mont-Pèlerin

The Gambardella family opens Santa Caterina on the Amalfi coast

Les Crayères is built at Reims for the Pommery family; it opens as a hotel in 1983

Echigoya becomes Mitsukoshi, a department store

Mitsukoshi issues its Department Store Proclamation — the first department store in Japan

The Société du Louvre buys the Crillon mansion from the Polignac heirs to make it a hotel

The St. Regis opens on Fifth Avenue, built by John Jacob Astor IV

The St. Regis opens on Fifth Avenue, built by John Jacob Astor IV

Marchesi 1824 / Cova — Milan maisons in their present form ⚑

Villa Honegg opens above Lake Lucerne on the Bürgenstock

Korean merchants raise 100,000 won and found Gwangjang in July, watching Japan take Namdaemun — the country’s first permanent daily market, created as a protest

Adriano Telles opens A Brasileira on 19 November to sell Brazilian coffee by the kilo

Robert Steffen, a village schoolteacher, buys land at Gstaad after a railway is routed through the hamlet

The Metropol opens in Moscow, its façade carrying Vrubel's mosaic

The Ritz London opens on 24 May by Mewès and Davis — a steel frame and a private bathroom in every room

The Gresham Palace opens in Budapest as an insurance house; it becomes a hotel in 2004

The Montreux Palace opens on Lake Geneva

Pike Place Market opens in Seattle as a revolt against the middlemen raising food prices — farmers selling direct

The Bussaco Palace opens in Portugal, built as a royal hunting lodge

The Winter Palace opens at Luxor

Axel Munthe's Villa San Michele at Anacapri is completed; Capri becomes a destination for artists and writers

The Fairmont opens in San Francisco, a year after the earthquake

The Adlon opens in Berlin with the Kaiser present

The Plaza opens on Fifth Avenue at Central Park

The Fairmont opens in San Francisco, a year after the earthquake

Ellsworth Statler opens the Buffalo Statler on 18 January — a thousand rooms, a private bath in every one, and the first hotel chain

The Hôtel Majestic opens on the avenue Kléber; it reopens as The Peninsula Paris in 2014

The Hejaz Railway reaches Medina, compressing a journey that had been made by caravan for a thousand years and moving where the traveller stops

A Brasileira begins serving coffee by the cup; the bica follows

César Ritz registers the Ritz name as a brand in Paris and London

The Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat opens on its own peninsula

The Excelsior opens on the Venice Lido

The Waldhaus opens at Sils Maria, held by the same family since

Androuët opens in Paris and makes the cheese cellar a place customers enter

The Atlantic opens on the Aussenalster at Hamburg

The Hôtel Royal opens at Évian for the Empress of France

The Hôtel Royal opens at Évian above the lake

Harry Gordon Selfridge opens on Oxford Street with a Silence Room that sells nothing

Harry Gordon Selfridge opens on Oxford Street and puts cosmetics on the ground floor

The Hôtel de Crillon opens on 11 March, converted by Walter-André Destailleur

The Nara Hotel opens, built by the Japanese government railways

Vidago Palace opens in northern Portugal at the order of Carlos I

The Lutetia opens on the boulevard Raspail, built by the Bon Marché for its suppliers

The Ritz Madrid opens, promoted by Alfonso XIII after he found no hotel fit for his guests

Otto Goring opens the Goring; it remains the only London grand hotel still family-owned

The Grand Hotel Tremezzo opens on Lake Como

The Grand Hotel Tremezzo opens; the De Santis family takes it in 1975

The New York Bar opens at 5 rue Daunou on Thanksgiving Day, its fittings shipped from Manhattan

The Viceregal Palace is added at Narendra Nagar for a viceroy's visit that never happens

Albert Keller forms the Ritz-Carlton Investing Company, franchising the name in the United States

A tramway from Cagnes-sur-Mer to Vence via Saint-Paul opens the village to the outside world

Benoît opens in Paris

Bến Thành opens on its present site in Saigon under the French administration

Le Normandy opens at Deauville, built as a Norman manor in half-timber

The Manila Hotel opens; MacArthur lives in its penthouse from 1935

The Palace opens in Madrid at the wish of Alfonso XIII, with the largest stained-glass dome in Spain

The María Cristina opens at San Sebastián, named for the queen regent

RMS Titanic sails on 10 April with a Ritz restaurant à la carte, a Café Parisien and the first swimming pool at sea in her class, and is lost on the 15th — a house that existed for five days

The Astoria opens on St Isaac’s Square, by Fyodor Lidval — cork soundproofing, central vacuum extraction, running hot water and light-signal service calls: the most advanced house in the empire

The Sursock villa is built in Beirut; it is later given to the city as a museum

The Beverly Hills Hotel opens before the city around it exists

The Astoria opens in St Petersburg, by Fyodor Lidval

Suvretta House opens above St. Moritz

Keswick Hall is built in Virginia; it becomes a hotel in 1993

François André takes the Deauville casino; the Barrière group grows from it

Antoni de Falguera's Modernist arches are installed at the Rambla entrance; the metal roof follows in 1914 and ends the era of open stalls

Le Royal opens at Deauville facing the sea

The Bellevue Palace opens in Bern beside the federal parliament

The Carlton opens at St. Moritz, built as a summer residence for Nicholas II ⚑ the imperial link is house tradition

The Párisi Udvar is built in Budapest as a bank and arcade; it opens as a hotel in 2019

The Excelsior opens at Dubrovnik below the old city walls

The Collins Bridge opens on 12 June, two and a half miles of wood and the longest in the world; Fisher, who paid to finish it, is in Indianapolis

The Savoy Moscow takes its first guests on 30 March, by Victor Velichkin

The Grand Hotel Palazzo della Fonte opens at Fiuggi

The Hôtel Plaza Athénée opens on the avenue Montaigne, days after the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées

Badrutt's Palace opens Europe's first indoor tennis courts

The Gstaad Palace opens above the village

The Gstaad Palace opens on 8 December as the Royal-Hôtel and Winter Palace — 165 rooms, 70 with their own bathroom

The Carlton opens on the Croisette at Cannes

The Greenbrier's present hotel opens at White Sulphur Springs

Le Negresco opens on the Promenade des Anglais, built by Henri Negresco

The Chosun Hotel opens in Seoul; Shinsegae revives the name as Josun in 2020

The Poseidonion opens on Spetses, built by Sotirios Anargyros

Caffè San Marco opens in Trieste on 3 January, months before the war

The Eden Roc pavilion is built 400 yards from the Grand Hôtel du Cap

Ngiam Tong Boon creates the Singapore Sling at the Long Bar, Raffles

A men's tennis tournament is held on the Palace clay courts; it becomes the Swiss Open

The Tokyo Station Hotel opens inside the new Marunouchi terminus

The Pennsylvania Railroad announces a hotel opposite its own Penn Station; the New York Central builds the Commodore beside Grand Central at the same time, by the same contractor

Statler buys the operating lease of the unbuilt Hotel Pennsylvania on 11 December for $1m a year

Statler pays $1m a year on 11 December for the operating lease of a hotel the Pennsylvania Railroad is building opposite its own station

The Mercado de San Miguel opens in Madrid, its iron-and-glass hall modelled on Les Halles

Johannes Müller builds Schloss Elmau in Bavaria as a retreat

Kirk Kerkorian is born in Fresno, California, on 6 June

The Halekulani opens at Waikiki

Germain Passédat acquires Le Petit Nice at the Anse de Maldormé, Marseille

The Coburg is renamed the Connaught during the First World War

The monarchy falls; Anna Demel keeps the K.u.K. warrant on the shop and the packaging

Picasso holds his wedding banquet at Le Meurice

The Mount Nelson is painted pink by manager Aldo Renato to mark the peace

The Hotel Pennsylvania opens in New York with 2,200 rooms

The Hotel Pennsylvania opens on 25 January with 2,200 rooms, each with a bath — the largest hotel in the world, built by a railway and linked to its station by a tunnel

The Palace opens in Barcelona as the Ritz, on the Gran Via

The Fäßler family opens the Sonnenalp at Ofterschwang

S. F. B. Morse forms Del Monte Properties and buys the Monterey coast for $1.34 m — golf courses with the views, residential lots around them, and the lot sales paying for the courses

Fisher Island is created out of the spoil from dredging Biscayne Bay

The international delegations draft the Covenant of the League of Nations in the Crillon's salons

Construction begins on the Copacabana Palace at President Pessoa's initiative

Conrad Hilton buys the Mobley in Cisco, Texas, for $40,000 after failing to buy a bank

The Palace opens in Barcelona as the Ritz, on the Gran Via

Otto Buchinger opens his first fasting clinic after curing himself by fasting

The Repulse Bay Hotel opens in Hong Kong; it closes in 1982

Badrutt's Palace installs the Engadin's first hotel lift and first telephone box

Paul Roux, a farmer's son, opens the café-bar Chez Robinson at Saint-Paul-de-Vence

Charles Cottar establishes the first professional safari outfit in East Africa

The Ritz Paris bar is opened by Frank Meier; it is renamed for Hemingway in 1994

The Hotel Casino Carrasco opens in Montevideo on 4 February

The Cambon bar opens at the Ritz Paris; women are made to wait outside in the Dog House

Jay Arthur Pritzker is born in Chicago on 26 August

The Dalat Palace opens in the Vietnamese highlands as a French hill station hotel

Louis Alexandre Raimon is born at Saint-Tropez; he apprentices in Cannes at sixteen

Howard Carter opens the tomb of Tutankhamun in November; the first modern tourism boom of the Middle East follows

Raffles Hotels' forerunner era; the brand is revived under Accor from 2016

The Polana opens at Lourenço Marques, by Herbert Baker

Statler buys an entire block on Niagara Square, betting Buffalo's civic centre will move there, and buys and closes his main rival to guarantee the trade

La Mamounia opens at Marrakech in the sultan's wedding-gift gardens

Harry MacElhone buys the bar and gives it his name

The first food counter inside a department store opens at Le Bon Marché

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial opens on 1 September, the day of the Great Kantō Earthquake, and survives it damaged — the legend hardens faster than the fact

La Grande Épicerie opens within Le Bon Marché

The Copacabana Palace opens in Rio with its casino, by Joseph Gire

Hippolyte Jammet buys the Castellane mansion on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré

The Copacabana Palace opens on 13 August, eleven months after the centenary it was built for

Palm Court opens at the Chosun — recorded by the company as Korea’s first French restaurant

The Gateway of India is completed, twenty-one years after the Taj it stands beside

Gleneagles opens in Perthshire, built by the Caledonian Railway

French bombardment damages the Damascus souq during the Great Syrian Revolt

Abdulaziz Ibn Saud enters Jeddah in December and takes Bayt Nassif as his residence for about ten years

The Majestic opens on the Saigon riverfront

Le Bristol opens in April, named for the 4th Earl of Bristol

The Dallas Hilton opens — the first hotel to carry the Hilton name

Wildflower Hall is built at Mashobra as Lord Kitchener's residence

Hemingway names Harry's in The Sun Also Rises

The Surrey opens on the Upper East Side

A category four hurricane hits Miami Beach on 18 September while Fisher is at Montauk; Miami Beach was the security for the Montauk financing and both go

The Hôtel Barrière Le Majestic opens on the Croisette, built by Théo Petit — the house that later carries the U Spa, now the Spa Diane Barrière; ⚑ the spa’s own opening year is not established

The Majestic opens at Cannes

The Varty and Taylor families buy the land that becomes Londolozi

Caviar Kaspia opens at 17 place de la Madeleine

The Principe di Savoia opens in Milan on the Piazza della Repubblica

The Country Club opens at Lima in the Spanish colonial manner

The Tannenhof opens at St Anton am Arlberg

Hotel New Grand opens at Yokohama and goes on to author three dishes of Japanese everyday cooking

Jean and Madeleine Carette open their tea room on the place du Trocadéro

J. Willard and Alice Marriott open a nine-seat root beer stand in Washington in May

The Carlyle opens on Madison Avenue

Thirty-eight European hoteliers meet and form the Luxury Hotels of Europe and Egypt; it becomes The Leading Hotels of the World

The Hay-Adams opens on Lafayette Square facing the White House

Le Royal Monceau opens on the avenue Hoche

Castello del Sole opens at Ascona on its own farm

Monte-Carlo Beach opens on the Riviera shore under the SBM

The Schneider family opens the Almhof at Lech

The Hôtel George V opens on its avenue, financed by Joel Hillman at $31m

The Peninsula opens in Tsim Sha Tsui, built by the Kadoorie family

Hans Badrutt buys the Chesa Veglia to save it from demolition

Switzerland's first Olympic-sized outdoor pool is built in the Gstaad Palace grounds

The Peninsula opens in Tsim Sha Tsui

The Alfonso XIII opens in Seville for the Ibero-American Exposition

The Cloister opens at Sea Island, built by Howard Coffin and designed by Addison Mizner

Spain opens its first parador, at Gredos, on the king's initiative

Burgh Island Hotel opens off the Devon coast, built by Archibald Nettlefold — art deco on a tidal island reached by sea tractor

The Chateau Marmont opens on Sunset Boulevard, modelled on a Loire château

Victor Sassoon opens the Cathay on the Shanghai Bund

The Miramare opens at Santa Margherita Ligure

Adan Diehl opens the Hotel Formentor on Mallorca

Intourist is founded on 12 April — ⚑ hospitality becomes an instrument of foreign policy, and by 1937 holds 27 hotels and 2,778 rooms that Soviet citizens may not enter

Victor Sassoon opens the Cathay Hotel on the Bund — the house that made the waterfront, and now the Fairmont Peace Hotel

Both Astor hotels are demolished for the Empire State Building

Emmanuel Martinez opens the Hôtel Martinez on the Croisette

Le Royal opens in Phnom Penh

The Tschuggen opens at Arosa

Victor Sassoon opens the Cathay Hotel on the Shanghai Bund

Jean-Baptiste and Marie Troisgros open the Hôtel des Platanes in Roanne

Yuki Teiichi opens a room 1.8m wide in Osaka — Kitcho

Albert Steigenberger takes the Europäischer Hof at Baden-Baden and founds the group

La Voile d'Or opens at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat

Harry Craddock compiles The Savoy Cocktail Book

The Pierre opens on Fifth Avenue at Central Park

The King George opens on Syntagma Square

Alden Freeman builds Casa Casuarina on Ocean Drive, modelled on the Alcázar de Colón and built partly with brick brought from it

Mitsukoshi opens a Gyeongseong branch in occupied Seoul on 20 October; the building is now Shinsegae, and whether that makes it the first Korean department store is still argued

Gaston Hochar founds Château Musar at Ghazir

Pierre Desfontaines joins two macaron shells with ganache at Ladurée

Mitsukoshi Gyeongseong opens in Seoul; it later becomes Shinsegae

The George V charters flights to London, Madrid and Berlin on its own three-seat Farman

William Avery Rockefeller II builds Camp Wonundra on Saranac Lake; it opens as The Point in 1980

Giuseppe Cipriani opens Harry's Bar, Venice, on 13 May

Cellular-therapy research begins at Clinique La Prairie, Montreux

The King David opens in Jerusalem, built in local pink limestone

Hapag-Lloyd introduces the expedition cruise

The King David opens in Jerusalem, built to receive a British Mandate that would not last

Sea Cloud is launched as a private four-masted barque for Marjorie Merriweather Post; it is still sailing with guests

The Hôtel de Paris opens at the village entrance — the first luxury hotel in Saint-Tropez

François Dupré buys the George V after Hillman loses it to his lenders

The Waldorf Astoria opens on Park Avenue on 1 October — the largest and tallest hotel in the world

Arshak Sarkies dies on 9 June; a bankruptcy petition is filed against Raffles the next day

The Dorchester opens on Park Lane, one of the first hotels built of reinforced concrete

Burgh Island is extended; its restaurant still carries the Nettlefold name

The Grand Hotel d'Angkor opens at Siem Reap for travellers to the temples

The Majestic opens in Kuala Lumpur

The Ensesa family opens the Hostal de la Gavina at S'Agaró

Al Mahatta opens at Sharjah on the Imperial Airways route to India, with a rest house beside the airfield — the air passenger becomes a new kind of guest

Carpentras truffle brokers open Maison de la Truffe on the place de la Madeleine

Slavia is rebuilt in Art Deco with windows cut to the Vltava and the Castle

Prince Umberto of Savoy grants Luigi Albanese a restaurateur's licence after he treats the prince's sea-urchin wound — Da Luigi ai Faraglioni begins

Paul and Baptistine Roux turn Le Robinson into a three-room inn and rename it La Colombe d'Or

Roux hangs the sign: lodging here for man, horse or painter — artists begin paying in pictures

Michel Guérard is born in Vétheuil on 27 March

Yuki Teiichi invents the Shōkadō bento from a tea utensil

The Cassino da Urca opens in Rio; Carmen Miranda sings there before gambling is banned in 1946

Gracie Fields buys Il Fortino on Marina Piccola for £11,000 — the fort where she had once stayed as a guest

The National and the Metropol are taken into Intourist

Les Deux Magots founds its literary prize

Lapérouse takes three Michelin stars, held until 1968

Swiss Deluxe Hotels is founded — a national association of first-class houses

The Hôtel Saint-Georges opens on the Beirut waterfront, by Antoine Tabet with Auguste Perret — its pool club becomes where the political and social life of the Levant takes place

Mohan Singh Oberoi pawns his wife’s jewellery to buy Clarkes at Shimla, having started as a front-desk clerk at the Cecil in 1922

Fitzgerald opens Tender Is the Night with the Hôtel du Cap, as the Hôtel des Étrangers

Fernand Petiot formulates the Bloody Mary at the King Cole Bar, St. Regis New York

Palacio Duhau is built in Buenos Aires for the Duhau family

Tsukiji opens as Tokyo's central wholesale market after the Great Kantō earthquake destroyed Nihonbashi

The Guana Island club opens in the British Virgin Islands

Chesa Veglia opens as a restaurant on Helen Badrutt’s idea, seven years after Hans bought the farmhouse to stop its demolition

SS Normandie enters service with a dining room longer than the Hall of Mirrors, lit by Lalique — the high point of the liner as an interior

The Hotel Moskva opens on Manezhnaya on 20 December, its second tower unbuilt until 1977

Portofino stops building: no new house is raised on the harbour after this year

Hans Badrutt converts the Chesa Veglia farmhouse into a dance bar and restaurant — après-ski begins

Chesa Veglia opens on 28 December on Helen Badrutt's idea — après-ski is born

Da Luigi ai Faraglioni opens on the rocks at Capri — the earliest verified beach club in the register ⚑ Italian sources date the licence to 1932

Sant Ambroeus opens as a pasticceria beside La Scala

The Krallerhof opens at Leogang under the Altenberger family

The Imperial opens at New Delhi; Nehru, Gandhi, Jinnah and Mountbatten later talk there informally

La Résidence de la Pinède begins operating on the Baie des Canoubiers

The Ritz manager's American wife stages a sit-in and the Cambon bar admits women

Château Saint-Martin opens above Vence in a twelfth-century Templar commandery

The Moosbrugger family takes the Gasthof Post at Lech

The Principe di Piemonte opens at Viareggio

The Bando opens at Sogong-dong, eight storeys and then the tallest in Seoul; Lotte Hotel Seoul later stands on the site

Ernst and Silvia Scherz take over the Gstaad Palace; they buy all the shares in 1947

Leopold and Josefine Hawelka take over the Café Ludwig in Dorotheergasse in May

Rancho La Puerta opens in Tecate — second-oldest house in the wellness field

Swiss national gold is stored in the bunker beneath the Gstaad Palace during the war

The south becomes the free zone; artists and writers move to the coast and the Colombe d'Or becomes their meeting place

Lane Crawford’s assets are seized in occupied Hong Kong and its operations handed to Matsuzakaya

Chatuchak begins in Bangkok by government decree; it grows to fifteen thousand stalls

The Post Hotel opens at Lake Louise

Portugal opens its first pousada, at Elvas, in state-owned historic buildings

Rosy and Maria Carita reach Paris; their first salon opens in 1945 on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré

Churchill, Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek hold the Cairo Conference at Mena House in November

Umaid Bhawan is completed at Jodhpur after fifteen years, built as famine relief work

The Budapest market hall is wrecked in the war; it goes bankrupt in 1991 and is restored in 1994

Eisenhower is housed at the George V during the Liberation of Paris

Raymond Thuilier takes the Oustau de Baumanière at Les Baux-de-Provence

The Bel-Air opens in a Los Angeles canyon around a stream and swans

⚑ The Irgun bombs the wing of the King David used by the British authorities; ninety-one people are killed

Decree-Law 9,215 bans gambling throughout Brazil on 30 April; some 70 casinos close

The first Cannes Film Festival opens; the Carlton and the Martinez become its infrastructure

The Eagle Club is founded at Wasserngrat above Gstaad as a private members' ski club

The Blue Train enters service between Pretoria and Cape Town

Regent's forerunner era begins; Robert Burns founds Regent International in 1970

Pan Am forms Intercontinental Hotels to serve its own routes across Latin America

Hilton Hotels Corporation is formed; it lists on the New York Stock Exchange the following year

Ian Fleming builds GoldenEye at Oracabessa, where he wrote the Bond novels

Ian Fleming's villa at GoldenEye becomes the Fleming Villa

Loews is founded by the Tisch brothers

Roy Kelley opens his first Waikiki hotel; Outrigger grows from it

Bemelmans Bar opens at the Carlyle; Ludwig Bemelmans paints the murals for a year's board

Vila Bled becomes Tito's summer residence; it opens as a hotel in 1984

The Asaka-no-miya summer villa at Karuizawa is sold to Tsutsumi Yasujirō and reopens as the Prince Hotel — the chain takes its name from the princes whose land it bought

Yekutiel and Samuel Federmann buy the twenty-one-room Kaete Dan guesthouse on the Tel Aviv seafront

The Phoenicia opens outside the city gate — Malta’s first grand hotel, begun before the war and finished after it

Christian Dior shows the New Look — the fashion maison enters hospitality's future customer base

Statler Hotels buys the Hotel Pennsylvania outright from the Pennsylvania Railroad and renames it the Hotel Statler

Villa La Massa opens on the Arno outside Florence in a Medici villa

Conrad Hilton forms Hilton International

The Gritti Palace opens in the sixteenth-century residence of Doge Andrea Gritti

Lucia Fiorentino and Peppino Arcucci build La Fontelina on the rocks at Capri

Conrad Hilton acquires the Waldorf Astoria

Chanut Piyaoui opens the Princess Hotel in Bangkok in May — a pool and air conditioning, rare in the city

Yves Montand and Simone Signoret meet at the Colombe d'Or

Conrad Hilton acquires the Waldorf Astoria; the brand becomes a Hilton line

The Caribe Hilton opens in San Juan — the first Hilton outside the continental United States

Cap Estel opens on its own peninsula at Èze-sur-Mer

Pink Sands opens on Harbour Island

Cova moves to via Montenapoleone, into the future fashion quadrilateral

Kibbutzim begin running guesthouses as collective enterprises — members as staff, profits held in common

Gracie Fields builds La Canzone del Mare on a former fort at Marina Piccola, with a pool cut in the shape of Capri

Lucien Barrière takes the family casino business after François André

Hermine Bareiss opens her house at Baiersbronn

Doğuş Group is founded in Türkiye; its hospitality investments follow decades later

Le Bristol opens and gives its name to a political era, because the meetings are held in it

Charles Forte is principal caterer at the Festival of Britain, then takes London Airport

Beachcomber opens the Park Hotel at Curepipe — the first hotel company in Mauritius

Shepheard’s burns on 26 January in the Cairo fire

La Chèvre d'Or opens at Èze in the medieval village above the sea

La Ponche opens at Saint-Tropez in the fishermen's quarter

Grand Prince Hotel Takanawa opens on the site of the Takeda-no-miya residence, the first hotel built on land bought from a family stripped of its title

The Red Palace is built for King Saud — the first reinforced-concrete building in the country

Marriott goes public at $10.25 a share; the offering sells out in two hours

Paul Roux lies dying; Titine tells Picasso the house owns no work of his and returns with three paintings

Le Sirenuse opens at Positano, converted from the Sersale family's summer house

Rémy de Haenen builds Eden Rock on the rock at St Jean, St Barths

Round Hill opens in Jamaica, its cottages owned by Astaire, Kennedy and Hepburn

Dan Hotels opens its first house at Tel Aviv

Rudolf-August Oetker buys the Brenners Park-Hotel at Baden-Baden

Franco Sersale converts the family's Positano summer house into Le Sirenuse

Hilton buys the Statler chain for $111m — the largest real-estate transaction on record at the time

Cheval Blanc is classified Premier Grand Cru Classé A in the first Saint-Émilion classification

Alfonso von Hohenlohe opens the Marbella Club and invents the Costa del Sol season

Jacques Dessange opens his first salon in Paris, having been dismissed twelve times in a year

Traditions et Qualité is founded, later Les Grandes Tables du Monde

The Beijing Friendship Hotel opens for Soviet and other foreign experts — socialist international hospitality, the closest Chinese parallel to Intourist

Jacques Courtin-Clarins opens an institute at 35 rue Tronchet — a spa that became a cosmetics house

The Taittinger family acquires the Hôtel de Crillon

Marcel and Nelly Tilloy found Les Relais de Campagne on 12 May at Le Chapon Fin, Thoissey, with eight houses

Alfonso von Hohenlohe opens the Marbella Club — the aristocratic house party as a hotel

Charles Forte buys the Café Royal

Hilton buys the Statler chain for $111m — then the largest real-estate transaction on record

The Fontainebleau opens at Miami Beach, designed by Morris Lapidus

Kerkorian makes his first gaming investment, a stake in the Dunes Hotel

Club 55 begins feeding the cast of Et Dieu… créa la femme at Pampelonne

Le Girelier opens on the port at Saint-Tropez

Akasaka Prince Hotel opens with thirty rooms on the former estate of Prince Yi Un, the last crown prince of Korea

Dalloyau creates the gâteau Opéra

Isadore Sharp works construction summers for his father in Toronto; Ray Kroc opens his first McDonald's franchise

Seibu opens the first Prince Hotel in Tokyo

Troisgros takes its first Michelin star

The Baalbeck International Festival begins staging performances inside a Roman temple complex

Vadim shoots And God Created Woman with Bardot; Saint-Tropez becomes a destination

Giuseppe Cipriani begins the Hotel Cipriani on the Giudecca, financed by three Guinness sisters

Adrian Zecha joins Time's Tokyo bureau, where the ryokan enters his idea of a hotel

The Divan opens in Istanbul, built by the Koç family

Jay Pritzker sees the Hyatt House beside Los Angeles International Airport in August and buys it; the family begins operating on 24 September

Jeanne Augier inherits the Negresco and holds it for sixty-two years

The Cantinetta Antinori opens in the family palazzo in Florence

The Falkensteiner family opens its first Austrian pension

The Amigo opens in Brussels beside the Grand-Place, in a former prison

The Hotel Ukraina opens in Moscow on 25 May with 1,026 rooms — the largest hotel in Europe, on ground that used to flood

Jay Pritzker buys Hyatt House, a motor lodge by Los Angeles airport — the company begins at an airport

The Eagle Club is founded on the Wasserngrat above Gstaad, the Earl of Warwick its first president and the Aga Khan among its founding members

André Godard begins the restoration that turns the Madar-e Shah into a hotel; it opens in 1966 as the Shah Abbas

Gaston Lenôtre buys a small bakery in the 16th arrondissement

Jay Pritzker buys the Hyatt House motel by Los Angeles airport — the first hotel of the group

The Waldorf Astoria loses the height record to Moscow's Hotel Ukraina after twenty-six years

The Twin Bridges Motor Hotel opens in Arlington in January — Marriott's first hotel, thirty years after the root beer stand

The Earl of Warwick founds the Eagle Club on the Wasserngrat above Gstaad

The Twin Bridges Motor Hotel opens — Marriott's first

Michel Guérard receives the title Meilleur Ouvrier de France in pastry

The Andreadis family opens the Astir Palace at Vouliagmeni

The Bocca family opens the first Sina house in Italy

Harry MacElhone dies; most of the bar's cocktail claims date from after this

The Astir Palace opens at Vouliagmeni; Four Seasons takes it in 2019

EPAD is created by decree on 9 September; the CNIT is inaugurated three days later and Malraux says nothing like it has been built since the Gothic cathedrals

Gulfstream is founded as a division of Grumman

Dan Hotels acquires and restores the King David

Guests arrive at the Hotel Cipriani two years after work began on the Giudecca

Gravetye Manor opens as a hotel in William Robinson's Elizabethan house and garden

Omni's forerunner Dunfey Hotels begins in New Hampshire

Donald N. Pritzker takes over management of the Hyatt hotel business

The Gardena Grödnerhof opens at Ortisei

The Casino du Liban opens at Maameltein — the Levant’s answer to Monte-Carlo

Charles Forte opens Britain's first full motorway service station at Newport Pagnell

Marlon Brando climbs a Tahitian peak on a day off from Mutiny on the Bounty and sees Tetiaroa on the horizon

An international airport opens on Tahiti, putting French Polynesia within reach of jet travel

The Aga Khan first visits the Gallura coast in December, after a British banker returns from sailing Sardinia with stories of it

The Capri Palace opens at Anacapri

Santa Marina opens on Ornos bay at Mykonos

The Schneider family's Hotel Arlberg opens at Lech

The Trofana Royal opens at Ischgl

Laurance Rockefeller takes a 99-year lease on Parker Ranch land at Kauna‘oa Bay — no road, no power, no fresh water

Jean-Prosper Gay-Para hears of Byblos in Beirut and resolves to build one at Saint-Tropez

Hotel Bora Bora opens as the island's first large hotel — eighteen thatched huts by Hammarberg and Herman on a point between Pofai Bay and Matira Beach

Hotel Bora Bora opens with eighteen thatched huts at Pointe Raititi — the island's first hotel

Marlon Brando arrives to film Mutiny on the Bounty and meets his Polynesian co-star Tarita Teriipaia

The Palace Hotel opens facing the Imperial Palace moat in Tokyo

Castillo Son Vida opens in a thirteenth-century Mallorcan castle

Sugar Beach opens between the Pitons

Biki calls Aldo Coppola to do the hair for her show at Palazzo Pitti; the same year is given for the first layered cut

The Phoenicia opens, by Edward Durell Stone, with an underwater window from the pool into the bar — the most copied idea in Middle Eastern hotels

Isadore Sharp opens the Four Seasons Motor Hotel on Jarvis Street, Toronto — 125 rooms on an unfashionable street

Isadore Sharp opens the Four Seasons Motor Hotel in Toronto

Sandy Lane opens in Barbados, built by Ronald Tree

Three Californians whose vanilla crop had failed buy a run-down Moorea property in March and name it Hotel Bali Hai after Michener

Brando marries Tarita Teriipaia, his co-star in Mutiny on the Bounty

The Consorzio Costa Smeralda is formed at Olbia on 14 March by the Aga Khan with Patrick Guinness, Felix Bigio, John Duncan Miller, André Ardoin and René Podbielski ⚑ the land is given as 1,800, 3,114, 4,000 and 5,000 hectares across sources

The consortium's building code fixes the rule the destination is built on: no building may rise above the height of the surrounding vegetation

The Corinthia Palace opens in Malta; the Pisani family builds the group from it

Alfred Pisani and his family found Corinthia in Malta; the first house at Attard opens as a restaurant

Hotel Okura opens, Yoshirō Taniguchi’s lobby becoming the international shorthand for Japanese restraint

InterContinental Jordan opens at Amman — the country’s first international five-star house

The Royal Tehran Hilton opens, by Heydar Ghiai with Raglan Squire — international modernism arrives in the capital

Sol Kerzner buys the Astra, a run-down inn in Durban — his first house

Le Rosay and the Gstaad winter season draw the international set to the Palace

Il Pellicano opens at Porto Ercole, built by Patsy Daszel and Michael Graham

The Okura opens in Tokyo, built for the 1964 Olympics with the Orient's own modernism

The Ocean Club opens on Paradise Island, built by Huntington Hartford

The Okura opens in Tokyo and gives the group its name

Il Pellicano opens at Porto Ercole; the Sciò family takes it in 1979

The Okura opens in Tokyo, the house Baron Kishichiro Okura's family built

Adán Diehl builds La Residencia at Deià on Mallorca

Mark Birley opens Annabel's at 44 Berkeley Square on 4 June

The Leali family opens the Villa Feltrinelli's forerunner at Gargnano

Hotel Cala di Volpe opens in July, built by Jacques Couëlle as a Mediterranean fishing village

Olbia airport is reopened and renamed Olbia-Costa Smeralda; the Aga Khan founds the Alisarda airline to serve it

La Scogliera opens on the rocks at Forte dei Marmi

The Mandarin opens in Hong Kong; the Oriental Bangkok joins in 1974 to form the group

Lee Byung-chull of Samsung acquires the Seoul store and renames it Shinsegae

Grand Walkerhill opens at Achasan, built by the state so that United Nations troops would take their leave in Korea rather than in Japan

Mohan Singh Oberoi's group is by now the largest Indian-owned hotel company

The Aga Khan founds the Costa Smeralda consortium in Sardinia

Hotel Pitrizza and the Cervo Hotel open in August; Luigi Vietti's Porto Cervo village is completed

The racial covenants Morse wrote into the Pebble Beach deeds are dropped as unenforceable after the Civil Rights Act

Gilbert Bécaud releases “Nathalie” in May, naming a Café Pushkin in Moscow that does not exist; French visitors spend the next thirty-five years looking for it

Gilbert Bécaud releases “Nathalie” in May, naming a café in Moscow that does not exist

Gilbert Bécaud sings of a Café Pouchkine in Nathalie — a place that does not exist

Tokyo Prince Hotel opens on ground that held the graves of Tokugawa shoguns, whose bodies were moved to Zōjō-ji

Hotel New Otani opens for the Tokyo Olympic Games

Sol Kerzner builds the Beverly Hills at Umhlanga Rocks — South Africa's first five-star hotel

The Beatles stay at the George V during their Paris Olympia run and write in a suite with a piano

Marlene Dietrich performs at the Gstaad Palace on 15 February; the gala season makes the hotel's name

NetJets pioneers fractional aircraft ownership as Executive Jet Aviation

Sofitel opens its first hotel at Strasbourg

Meadowood opens in the Napa Valley

The New Otani opens in Tokyo for the Olympic Games

Guérard takes over and renames Le Pot-au-Feu at Asnières-sur-Seine

The Capezzone family opens their first Corsican house

Hotel Romazzino opens in the summer, built by the Rank Organisation and later sold to the Aga Khan

Laurance Rockefeller opens Mauna Kea Beach Hotel on the Kohala coast

Spyros Kokotos opens Elounda Mare, the first Greek hotel with private-pool bungalows

José and Manuel Pestana acquire the Hotel Atlântico at Funchal ⚑ founder attribution varies across sources

Mauna Kea Beach Hotel opens in July with 154 rooms for $15 million, the most expensive hotel built to that date, and the first art collection assembled for any hotel anywhere

Laurance Rockefeller opens Mauna Kea Beach Hotel in July for $15 m — the most expensive hotel built to that date, with no televisions and no air-conditioning by design

Coppola opens his first atelier on Via Manzoni in Milan — ⚑ the company’s own home page dates itself to 1966 instead

Edward Charles Bassett’s Mauna Kea opens, open-air and ventilated by the trade winds, with the island’s first golf course by Robert Trent Jones Sr

Franz Xaver Mayr dies at ninety, having practised to the end

Construction begins on the Byblos in a Phoenician-Tropezian style

Fire destroys seventy buildings on the Bangkok riverfront; the Oriental is rebuilt

Spyros Kokotos builds Elounda Mare on Crete

After six years and a direct request to the president of France, Brando buys Tetiaroa for $270,000 from a nearly blind woman who moved about the island by wires strung between trees

Brando takes a 99-year lease on Tetiaroa, the twelve-motu atoll that had been the retreat of Tahitian royalty

Enrico and Bruna Cerea open Da Vittorio at Bergamo

Dessange puts his name on ten salons he does not work in — the hand, franchised

Lars-Eric Lindblad takes the first paying tourists to Antarctica, and to Galápagos the following year — the expedition cruise begins

Malliouhana opens at Anguilla

Chewton Glen opens in the New Forest

P.R.S. Oberoi opens the Oberoi Centre of Learning and Development

Hyatt Regency Atlanta opens as the first Hyatt Regency; John Portman’s 22-storey atrium establishes a new hotel typology

Le Pot-au-Feu receives its first Michelin star

Kurt Wachtveitl becomes general manager of the Oriental Bangkok and stays thirty-nine years

The Bali Hai Boys build three guest rooms on stilts over the lagoon at Raiatea — the first overwater bungalows, put up because the hotel had no beach

The Yacht Club Costa Smeralda is founded at Porto Cervo

Ricardo Urgell opens the first Pacha in Sitges

Les Caves du Roy opens beneath the Byblos in July; its creator sells the hotel on 19 September

Jet Aviation is founded at Basel; completions work follows from 1977

Hyatt Regency Atlanta opens with John Portman’s atrium, making a shared interior volume part of the hotel experience

RMS Queen Mary is retired to Long Beach and becomes a hotel, the first ship in this register to do so

The Golden Ring is designated as a tourist circuit — a Soviet invention applied to medieval ground

The Byblos is inaugurated on 27 May with Bardot and Mireille Darc among 700 guests

Les Caves du Roy opens in July

Gay-Para sells the Byblos to Sylvain Floirat in September, months after opening

William Heinecke founds his first companies at seventeen

Paul Dubrule and Gérard Pélisson open the first Novotel at Lille

Jocelyne and Jean-Louis Sibuet open their first house at Megève

Kerkorian sells Trans International Airlines to Transamerica; construction of the International begins

Guérard creates the salade gourmande, an early expression of his lighter cuisine

Troisgros takes three stars — held unbroken ever since

Fog in the valley keeps some 300 commercial flights from landing at Drake Field, the airport serving northwest Arkansas

Twelve American hoteliers form Preferred Hotels to compete with the chains

Petit St. Vincent opens in the Grenadines, its cottages summoned by flag

French radicals raid Fauchon on the Place de la Madeleine and distribute its foie gras to the poor

French radicals raid Fauchon and distribute its foie gras to the poor

Michael Chow opens Mr Chow in Knightsbridge on 14 February — Beijing food, Italian waiters, no chopsticks

Colin Tennant develops Mustique after buying the island for £45,000 in 1958

Hyatt Regency Hong Kong becomes Hyatt’s first hotel outside the United States

The International Hotel opens in Las Vegas with about 1,500 rooms at a cost of $55m — then the largest hotel in the world; Barbra Streisand headlines the opening, Elvis Presley follows

Schlosshotels und Herrenhäuser is formed to market castles and manor houses opened as hotels

Kerkorian sells the International to Hilton; it becomes the Las Vegas Hilton

Rudolf von Schönburg becomes general manager of the Marbella Club and stays fifty years

Tjandra Kusuma and his three sons found the Mulia Group in construction and building materials

Hotel Bora Bora builds fifteen overwater bungalows and makes the format world-famous ⚑ the hotel is often credited with inventing it three years too early

Hotel Bora Bora builds bungalows on stilts over the lagoon; the format becomes the island's signature

Maçakızı begins at Bodrum as a small pension and becomes the Aegean's social address

Merchants leave Al Balad for the new districts along the coast; the coral tower houses begin to fail

Khalaf Al Habtoor builds his first hotel in Dubai

Carlo Cinque opens Il San Pietro on the cliff below Positano, with no sign at the door

The Grand Hôtel de Cala Rossa opens in Corsica under the Canarelli family

David Mancuso holds the first Loft party, 'Love Saves the Day', on Valentine's Day

HAPAG merges with Norddeutscher Lloyd after a rivalry of 113 years, and transatlantic passenger service ends

The government creates Qatar National Hotels to run one hotel — ⚑ the state makes the hospitality company a year before the country has a five-star house

Warren Titus becomes founding president of Royal Viking Line, moving the hotel-at-sea from the liner to the smaller ship

Nadaman opens inside the Imperial Hotel Tokyo

David Mancuso's Loft parties begin in New York — the ancestor of the modern dance floor

Hapag-Lloyd is formed from the merger of HAPAG, founded 1847, and Norddeutscher Lloyd

Robert Burns founds Regent International Hotels with the Tokyu Group

Jaisal Singh's parents and his uncle Valmik Thapar buy land on the edge of Ranthambhore

Forte Village opens in southern Sardinia

Japan Airlines opens the first Hotel Nikko

Le Pot-au-Feu receives a second Michelin star

Hacienda Na Xamena opens on the north cliffs of Ibiza

Shang Palace opens with the first Shangri-La, in Singapore

The first Starbucks opens in Pike Place Market

Elounda Beach opens in Crete

Jimmy'z opens beneath the Sporting d'été on 9 July, entry by club card only

The Gstaad Palace opens GreenGo, the village’s first real nightclub, its dance floor built over an indoor pool — ⚑ the year is derived from a 2017 account calling the club forty-five years old and is not sourced directly

Robert Kuok founds Shangri-La in Hong Kong — the first Asian luxury hotel brand to compete internationally on its own terms

For the 2,500-year celebration a tent city receives heads of state at Persepolis, and three hotels open to the same deadline — the InterContinental at Tehran, the Cyrus at Shiraz and the Darius at Persepolis

Lenôtre opens his cooking school at Plaisir

Mick and Bianca Jagger marry at the Byblos

GreenGo opens beneath the Gstaad Palace on 22 January, interior by Teo Jakob — unchanged since

The Daktylides family opens Sani Beach Club in Halkidiki

Walt Disney World opens in Florida with the Contemporary and the Polynesian

Robert Kuok opens the first Shangri-La in Singapore

The HRH Group is formed by the Mewar family of Udaipur

Ng Teng Fong's Far East Organization begins its Singapore hotel portfolio

Roberto Wirth becomes the fourth generation at the Hassler in Rome

Donald Pritzker dies at 39, after thirteen years in which Hyatt grew to 26 hotels

George Corbin lands at Hulhulé on 16 February with nineteen Italians — the first tourist group to reach the Maldives, hosted in three houses in Malé by Mohamed Umar Maniku, Hussain Afeef and Ahmed Naseem

Kurumba Village opens on Vihamanaafushi on Tuesday 3 October — the first resort in the Maldives: thirty beachfront rooms of coral stone, coconut timber and palm thatch, and a brackish-water shower

Yang Bingyi gives half his cooking-oil shop over to xiaolongbao — Din Tai Fung

The Pestana Carlton Madeira opens in November — the group's first hotel

Air France founds Le Méridien as a home away from home for its passengers

The Oriental joins Mandarin International and gives the group its name

Mohamed Umar Maniku opens Kurumba, the Maldives' first resort

The original MGM Grand opens with 2,084 rooms at a cost of $107m — again the largest hotel in the world

Baros opens in December with twenty-eight sand-floor thatched cabanas, the third resort in the Maldives and the first of the six islands the government released for tourism that year

Ricardo Urgell founds Pacha

The Grand Hotel opens in Taipei on the site of a Shinto shrine, built for Madame Chiang

Punta Tragara opens at Capri in a house built by Le Corbusier's client Emilio Vismara

Pacha Ibiza opens at Ses Feixes, built to look like a finca

Lord and Lady Macdonald open Kinloch Lodge on Skye

La Samanna opens on Baie Longue at St Martin

The Gulf Hotel opens, the first five-star house in Qatar, and its brutalist form becomes one of the recognisable buildings of Doha

Samsung takes over the state guest house Yeongbingwan

SK Group acquires Walkerhill; a Sheraton franchise follows in 1978 with a 538-room tower and casino

Guérard moves to Eugénie-les-Bains; the property takes the name Les Prés d’Eugénie and the restaurant receives one Michelin star

Henri Chenot first applies the method at the general hospital in Cannes

Michel and Christine Guérard open Les Prés d'Eugénie at Eugénie-les-Bains

Ireland’s Blue Book is founded by eleven country houses

Le Cirque opens at the Mayfair House Hotel, New York

Jimmy'z moves beneath the new Monte-Carlo Sporting Club with its Japanese lagoon

The Holiday Inn opens in Beirut; within a year it is a battlefield, and its shell is still standing fifty years later

Sazanka-sō becomes Nadaman's head branch, in the Hotel New Otani's samurai garden

Dave and John Varty take over Londolozi and begin restoring the land

Casa de Campo opens in the Dominican Republic, designed by Oscar de la Renta

Baglioni opens its first hotel in Florence

Les Prés d’Eugénie receives a second star; Grande Cuisine Minceur is formalised in the thermal setting

Muhammad Nassif turns the house into a private library of 16,000 books, open to anyone who calls on him

The Daskalantonakis family opens the first Grecotel

Constance opens Le Prince Maurice era in Mauritius ⚑ founding given variously

José Koechlin founds Inkaterra in Peru, one of the earliest ecotourism companies

Teritoria begins as a French association of producer-led hotels and restaurants

Le Girelier is trading on the Saint-Tropez port — ⚑ the house gives its own age as more than fifty years in French and as over a decade in its own English translation, and the trade press says fifteen; the year here is the earliest those claims allow and is not established

Peter Sellers and Blake Edwards film part of The Return of the Pink Panther in GreenGo, and Sellers falls into the pool under the dance floor

The civil war begins; the hotel district becomes a front line and the phase is named the Battle of the Hotels. ⚑ Château Musar goes on making wine and misses only two vintages in fifteen years

Arab International Hotels Company is founded; it signs with Marriott the following year

ITC enters hotels

Casino Carrasco declared a national historic monument

Michael Kadoorie takes the chair of The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels

Guérard appears on the cover of Time on 9 February and publishes La Grande Cuisine Minceur

The d'Ornano family take over the house that becomes Sisley

Antonio Escohotado leases a farmhouse at San Rafael and opens what becomes Amnesia

Dionísio Pestana arrives from South Africa at twenty-four to save the hotel his father was ready to abandon after the Carnation Revolution

Charles Ritz dies; his widow Monique takes the Ritz Paris

James Sherwood buys the Hotel Cipriani for £900,000 — the origin of Belmond

Gracie Fields hands the Canzone del Mare restaurant to Luigi Iacono

James Sherwood buys Hotel Cipriani — the origin of Belmond

Sandy and Kreis Beall open Blackberry Farm in the Tennessee foothills

Pan Pacific opens its first hotel in Singapore

Les Prés d’Eugénie receives three Michelin stars

Ayla Emiroğlu opens a sixteen-room pension in Bodrum — Maçakızı

The Spy Who Loved Me is filmed at Cala di Volpe and fixes the Costa Smeralda in the popular imagination

Studio 54 opens at 254 West 54th Street on 26 April

The Paradise Garage opens at 84 King Street with Larry Levan resident

Bukhara opens at the ITC Maurya; its menu barely changes for fifty years

Pio Galligani and Enrica del Rosso open Paper Moon on via Bagutta, Milan

Le Petit Nice takes its first Michelin star

Mohamed Umar Maniku and his brother Ahmed Umar Maniku consolidate their interests as Universal Enterprises (Private) Limited ⚑

Adam Tihany opens his New York design studio

John and Harry Mariani buy Castello Banfi at Montalcino

Le Palace opens on 1 March with Grace Jones singing La Vie en Rose

Les Bains Douches opens in the 1885 Guerbois baths, interiors by Philippe Starck

Roland Barthes reviews Le Palace for Vogue Hommes as a total art

Richard Branson flies to the British Virgin Islands looking for somewhere to house his record label’s artists, and buys Necker Island instead

Alfred Akirov founds Alrov, which will build Mamilla

The Hyatt Crown partly opens at Tehran; Hyatt’s management ends the following year and the building becomes the Parsian Azadi

The Oetker family buys Le Bristol

Anouska Hempel opens Blakes in South Kensington — the first designer hotel

John and Harry Mariani buy Castello Banfi at Montalcino

Patrick O'Connell and Reinhardt Lynch open The Inn at Little Washington in a converted garage

Jay and Cindy Pritzker establish the Pritzker Architecture Prize through the Hyatt Foundation

Costas Spiliadis opens the first Milos in Montreal

Cecconi's opens in Mayfair

Pierre-Yves Rochon opens his Paris studio

Neal's Yard Dairy opens in Covent Garden and begins buying from named farmhouse makers

Natura Bissé is founded in Barcelona

Richard Branson buys Necker Island; Virgin Limited Edition grows from it

The Daktylides family opens the first Myconian house

Khalaf Al Habtoor opens the Metropolitan Hotel — a local entrepreneur building hotels twenty years before the landmark projects

The Shilla opens on the Namsan slope on 8 March, built around the state guest house

The international operators leave; the Hilton becomes the Esteghlal and the Hyatt the Azadi

Hamed El Chiaty founds Travco — an integrated tourism platform rather than a hotel company

The Ritz family sells the Ritz Paris to Mohamed Al-Fayed and his brothers

Richard Branson buys Necker Island for £180,000 at twenty-eight

Sol Kerzner opens Sun City in the Pilanesberg

Lotte opens its first hotel in Seoul

The Shilla opens in Seoul on the former state guest house grounds

Caroline Rose Hunt founds Rosewood in Dallas

Roberto Sciò takes Il Pellicano at Porto Ercole

Grand Hyatt New York and Park Hyatt Chicago open, adding two brands to the Hyatt portfolio

Eighty-five people die in the fire at the original MGM Grand on 21 November; the disaster exposes critical weaknesses in hotel fire and smoke protection

Chenot Palace Merano opens

George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg found Yabu Pushelberg in Toronto

The first Grand Hyatt opens in Hong Kong ⚑ the brand is formalised in 1980

Studio 54 closes on 2 February after thirty-three months; Rubell and Schrager go to prison

Café del Mar opens in San Antonio on 20 June, built to face the sunset

The Landmark opens in Central — the first commercial atrium building in Hong Kong

Café del Mar opens at Sant Antoni on 20 June, facing the sunset

Luigi “Puny” Miroli opens his own restaurant on the Portofino Piazzetta and gives it his mother’s name for him — ⚑ the date is given as 1980 by the house, as some years after 1976 by his obituary, and as 1958 by a restaurant guide

Luigi Miroli opens Puny on the Portofino piazzetta

TCS World Travel begins private-jet expeditions

Park Hyatt launches in Chicago as Hyatt's luxury line

Jason Pomeranc's Thompson Hotels begin in New York

Starhotels is founded in Florence by the Fratini family

Georg Rafael forms Rafael Hotels after leaving Regent

Sweeping reform of fire codes and retrofitting after the MGM Grand fire changes life safety in casino hotels

Peter Borer joins the Peninsula Hong Kong, later running the group's hotels

Gordon Butch Stewart opens the first Sandals resort in Jamaica

The first EUROPA is commissioned, then the most luxurious cruise ship in the world

Bill Kimpton opens the Clarion Bedford in San Francisco — the American boutique hotel

Bob Harmon and Claude Rouas open Auberge du Soleil as a restaurant; cottages follow in 1985

Wolfgang Puck opens Spago on the Sunset Strip

Cellap Laboratoire founded at Le Mont-sur-Lausanne

Roland C. Pfister founds Cellap Laboratoire at Le Mont-sur-Lausanne; its treatments are at first available only to patients at his own clinic

Cheval acquires its first property in Cheval Place, Knightsbridge

The Sheraton Grand opens on the Corniche — a pyramid, the first international five-star house in the country, and the shape by which the skyline was known for thirty years

Amman Marriott takes its first guest in January — the third fully managed Marriott to open outside the United States

The Cairo Marriott opens inside the Gezira Palace, Marriott’s first hotel in Africa

Palace on Wheels launches through Rajasthan Tourism and Indian Railways, translating princely railway saloons into a moving hotel

James Sherwood returns the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express to service after five years of restoration

Venice Simplon-Orient-Express returns to service after James Sherwood's five-year restoration

British Pullman begins running restored Pullman carriages from London

Palace on Wheels enters service using former royal carriages of the princely states

Stein Eriksen Lodge opens at Deer Valley under the Olympic champion's name

Thomas Althoff opens his first hotel in Cologne

Rogério Fasano opens the family's first hotel in São Paulo

Colin Bell and partners found Wilderness Safaris in Botswana

Château de la Messardière opens above Saint-Tropez

Dessange introduces balayage

Fabrice Emaer dies; Le Palace begins changing hands

The White Swan opens on Shamian at Guangzhou, financed by Henry Fok — the moment China reopens to international hospitality on its own terms

Horst Schulze and William B. Johnson found the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company

Baros installs the first desalination plant in the Maldives, putting fresh water and bathtubs in guest rooms

Tony Chi founds his New York studio

The Harisch family takes the Lanserhof at Lans and applies the Mayr method

Richard Branson buys La Residencia at Deià on Mallorca

David Lewis opens the King Solomon at Eilat — the beginning of an Israeli resort industry

Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell open Morgans in New York — the boutique hotel begins

Le Toiny opens on the windward coast of St Barths

Beatrice Tollman founds Red Carnation Hotels

Christian Harisch's family takes the Lanserhof at Lans

Captain Vassilis Constantakopoulos begins buying land at Costa Navarino

Valmont is founded in Switzerland and begins licensing its protocol to hotels

The Groucho Club opens at 45 Dean Street on 5 May

Kit and Tim Kemp open their first Firmdale hotel in London

Al Bustan Palace opens at Muscat, built by Sultan Qaboos to host the first GCC summit held in the Sultanate and to mark the fifteenth year of his reign — Oman’s first house of this rank

Emirates begins flying, and aviation and hotels become one system: more air access supports more rooms, and a stronger destination makes the hub worth more

Renfe begins the Al Andalus and Transcantábrico services in Spain

The Royal Scotsman begins running through the Highlands

Conrad Hotels launches as Hilton's international luxury brand

Triple Creek Ranch opens in the Bitterroot valley, Montana

Sue Harmsworth founds ESPA

Kit and Tim Kemp open their first Firmdale hotel in London

Grace Leo takes the Hôtel Montalembert in Paris

The original MGM Grand hotels in Las Vegas and Reno are sold to Bally’s; MGM Grand, Inc. is founded as the corporate predecessor of the present company

Maguy and Gilbert Le Coze bring Le Bernardin to New York

Mulia Industrindo is established for glass and ceramics; the group moves into property

The Maldives' first overwater villa opens at Vadoo, nineteen years after Raiatea

Cal-a-Vie opens in California, an early destination spa built as a Provençal village

The Interalpen opens above Telfs in the Tyrol

Le Guanahani opens on St Barths; Rosewood takes it in 2021

Aldo Coppola Jr sets the corporate philosophy: owned salons, franchising, the first Italian freelance hair and make-up agency, an academy and a product line

Atle Brynestad founds Seabourn and invents the small luxury ship as a category — under 250 guests, all suites

Peck opens eighteen shops in Japan with Takashimaya

Mariage Frères opens its first tea room, 132 years after founding

Keith Haring paints Mr Chow as Green Prawn in a Bowl of Noodles

Captain C.P. Krishnan Nair opens the first Leela in Mumbai

Hyatt Gold Passport launches, extending the platform beyond individual properties

Kurumba is rebuilt as a full hotel — the step that moves the Maldives from cheap island holidays to the luxury market

The Paradise Garage closes

Olympia & York sign the £3 billion master building agreement for Canary Wharf

Selektion Deutscher Luxushotels is founded

Raffles is gazetted a national monument of Singapore on 4 March, in its centenary year

Seabourn is founded and launches Seabourn Pride

Tugu opens its first hotel in Indonesia, built around Anhar Setjadibrata's collection

Ed Tuttle designs Amanpuri, setting the visual language of Aman

Adrian Zecha hires Anthony Lark from the Regent Sydney at twenty-seven; he opens Amanpuri as Aman's first general manager and first employee

The Pavilions opens its first Asian house

The second summer of love: Oakenfold, Rampling and Fung take Alfredo's Amnesia sound to London

Cap Juluca opens at Maundays Bay on Anguilla

Pacific Place opens its first phase in Hong Kong; the second follows in 1991

Jean-Emmanuel Sauvée and a handful of merchant-navy officers found Ponant — the only line in this register started by its own crew

Jean-Paul Hévin opens Le Petit Boulé on the avenue de la Motte-Picquet

Orient-Express Hotels buys the Mount Nelson

Amanpuri opens on Pansea Beach, Phuket, in January — forty pavilions, no lobby, and the low-density resort begins

Ponant is founded in Nantes by officers of the French merchant marine

Four Seasons opens its first branded private residences — the model that becomes an industry

Claude and Petra Graves open NIHI Sumba as a surf camp at Nihiwatu

Andrea Kracht becomes the fifth generation at the Baur au Lac

Bill Bensley founds Bensley Design Studios in Bangkok

Small Luxury Hotels of the World is formed in Britain to market independent houses collectively

Pepe Roselló leases the Platja d'en Bossa building from the Matutes family and opens Space

The Grande Arche completes the axis from the Louvre, four kilometres away

Historic Hotels of America is founded by the National Trust for Historic Preservation

Raffles Holdings is established to restore Raffles Singapore and restructure Raffles City

Samih Sawiris begins El Gouna on empty Red Sea desert — a town rather than a resort, and the model later carried to Oman

Orient-Express Hotels buys the Copacabana Palace

Rohan Vos runs the first Rovos Rail train in South Africa

The Little Nell opens at the base of Aspen Mountain

The Northwest Arkansas Council is formed to get a new airport built, with Alice Walton as its first chair

André Balazs buys the Chateau Marmont

Esprit de France forms around historic French buildings

Ahmed Siyam Mohamed opens his first Maldivian resort

Theo Gerlach's Seaside Collection opens its first Canary Islands house

Villa Gallici opens at Aix-en-Provence

Raymonde Fenestraz opens Les Airelles at Courchevel, Austro-Hungarian in style, by the architect Richard Ferbach

Raymonde Fenestraz opens Les Airelles at Courchevel

Golden Eagle Luxury Trains begins operating the Trans-Siberian route

Rocky Mountaineer runs its first season through the Canadian Rockies

Mombo Camp opens on Chief's Island in the Okavango

Christina Ong's hospitality platform takes shape in London and becomes COMO

Universal Studios Florida opens; the resort's first hotel follows in 1999

Silks opens its first hotel in Taipei

Katikies opens at Oia on Santorini

Andronis begins at Oia, built into the caldera cliff

The Kwee family opens the first Pontiac Land hotel in Singapore

Jean-Noël Marcellesi begins the Corsican hospitality developments

Elisabeth Gürtler takes the Sacher and restores it

andBeyond is founded as Conservation Corporation Africa

José Padilla takes the residency at Café del Mar and begins curating the sunset as a sequence

José Padilla begins his sunset sets at Café del Mar; the bar starts selling recordings of its own atmosphere

Neemrana opens twelve rooms in a fort of 1464, bought as a ruin — and the Indian heritage-hotel industry follows

The Lanesborough opens in the former St George's Hospital on Hyde Park Corner

Maniku founds the Maldives Association of Tourism Industry and chairs it

Susan Harmsworth founds ESPA

A regional vote returns an overwhelming majority for a new airport; the FAA grant for the land follows in 1994

Adrian Zecha and Hans Jenni form GHM; the first Chedi opens at Bandung

The Muntoni family opens the first Delphina house in Gallura

Vila Vita Parc opens in the Algarve

Vomo opens in Fiji

Gianni Versace, in Miami on his way to Cuba, asks a taxi driver for something fancy and fun, is taken to South Beach, and buys the Amsterdam Palace for USD 2.95 million

Moscow-City is approved on a former quarry; three years later the money runs out and the project is frozen for a decade

God Nisanov and Zarakh Iliev, from the same home town, found Kievskaya Ploshchad in Moscow

Africa Foundation is founded, later Wild Impact

Les Airelles goes international on the Albertville Olympics and joins The Leading Hotels of the World

Terry Farrell’s practice draws the master plan for the air rights over Kowloon Station

Radisson Diamond sails; the line becomes Regent Seven Seas

Post Ranch Inn opens on the Big Sur cliffs, built by Mickey Muennig with no tree felled