Ritz Sale Could Top The Lot, But These Are The Richest Hotel Deals In History
After years of speculation, the Ritz hotel in London could finally be up for sale, with the price tag a huge £800M.
That would price each of the 126 rooms and suites at £6.1M, making it the most expensive hotel per key in history, according to The Times.
The hotel is owned by the British Barclay brothers, and has counted Winston Churchill and Paul Getty among its frequent patrons.
These are the five most expensive deals per room that the Ritz will top if it does indeed sell at that price.
In 2015, French luxury goods label LVMH paid close to £300M for the 85-room Bulgari Hotel & Residences in Knightsbridge, a price of £3.6M a room. The hotel is branded in the style of Italian luxury jewellery firm Bulgari.
After more than five years of legal wrangles and debt renegotiations, the Qatari royal family completed a deal in 2015 to buy Maybourne Hotel Group, which owns Claridge's, the Connaught and the Berkeley hotels in Mayfair, for £1.6B. The hotels have a total of 538 rooms, so the price equated to £2.9M per key.
The Plaza in New York is another hotel that was bought by the Qatari royal family after a complex debt workout: A Qatari vehicle bought the 282-room hotel from Indian company Sahara, whose founder needed to sell assets as part of a legal investigation. The $600M price equated to $2.6M (£2M) per room.
The art deco building which houses the 73-room Beaumont hotel in Mayfair in London has at various times over the last century been used as a car park, car hire depot and an office for U.S. and UK secret services. Grosvenor turned it into a five-star hotel, and in 2018 the Barclay brothers paid £140M for it, or £1.9M per key.
Paris has some of the world’s fanciest and most famous hotels, but only one makes this top five list, the Marriott Champs-Élysées. In 2014 Hong Kong-listed company Kai Yuan Holdings paid €344M for the hotel, which has 192 rooms on the famous thoroughfare close to the Arc De Triomphe. The price represents a figure of €1.79M (£1.55M) per key.
Lyon is not the first city that springs to mind when it comes to luxury hotels, but it rounds out the top five most expensive hotel sales ever. The 143-room InterContinental Lyon Hotel-Dieu is housed in a former hospital that forms part of a UNESCO world heritage site with a 360-metre frontage overlooking the Rhône river. It was bought in 2015 by French insurance company Crédit Agricole for €250M, a price of €1.75M (£1.5M) per key.
