Starwoods gets Odessa Bristol

Starwoods is about to open it second hotel in Ukraine, adding the Bristol in the Black Sea resort of Odessa to the Four Points in Zaporozhye, some 500 miles northeast on the Dnieper.
The hotel on Pushkinskaya Street is an elaborate Italianate building from 1894 that we have remarked on before. Renovation for Starwoods Luxury Collection will include a new bar and restaurant plus around 10,000 square feet of meeting space and will re-open in 2014.
It promises to offer "Authentic Travel Experiences to Global Explorers" –- and there was us thinking that, as travel experiences go, it had been pretty authentic up till now, especially when it was the Krasnaya in Soviet times.

Brendan Behan naked at the NY Bristol

Hotel Bristol, New York, no longer exists. 

"How bad a boozer was Brendan Behan?" asks the New York Post of the Irish playwrite, answering its own question with: "Bad enough to get himself banned from both the St. Patrick’s Day Parade and the Bristol Hotel, where he ran naked through the lobby."

This comes from a report today about a new play, Brendan in Chelsea, about 24 hours of his stay in the Chelsea, which was the last New York hotel that would have him. The play is written by his niece, Janet, and its star and director is Adrian Dunbar. It plays at the Acorn Theatre, New York, until Oct 6.

Behan, who described himself as “a drinker with a writing problem”, died in 1964 aged 41.

Vienna Bristol renovation

The Bristol Bar in the Bristol Hotel in Vienna has just reopned, the first part of a major overhaul of the five-star hotel.

The Bristol Bar is "indisputably"  one of the most favourite meeting places in Vienna for both guests and visitors, according to Hotel director Gerald Krischek. The main features of the Bristol have survived the renovation, which included furniture restoration and leopard patterned carpet flooring, plus a new lick of paint.

Opposite the state opera house, the hotel is known for its musical connections. This snippet comnes from The Spectator of June 1929:

"As we sat in the restaurant one evening, at the Bristol Hotel, enjoying the music after the hard work of the day, a particularly exquisite melody was being played. On asking the name of the composer, to our surprise we were told it was the head waiter."

The hotel is the subject of 'High Noon for the King's Moll' - a story in Hight Times at the Hotel Bristol. 

Beckham and the £15,000-a-night Le Bristol

Much has been made in the Press about David Beckham's residency in Paris where he is said to be paying £15,000 a night for the Imperial Suite at Le Bristol. The hotel's most expensive suite, pictured here, overlooks the garden and should be room enough for Victoria' wardrobe and their four boys.

Le Bristol is often in the news, not least on this blog, and it has many stories to tell, such as the extraordinary tale of the Hope Diamond, revealed in Chapter 19 of High Times at the Hotel Bristol.

Who knows the history of the Hotel Bristol in Kuwait?

An email arrives from the grandson of the late Jassim Al-Wazzan, one of the founding partners of the Hotel Bristol in Kuwair. He wants to know when the hotel opened.

Anyone who knows of the history of this hotel should get in touch. This postcard just came up on eBay. It was posted to an address in France in 1966.

Hotel Bristol air force souvenir

Here's a rarity, just come up on eBay – a tie with the Hotel Bristol advertised on it. Its seller merely says: "Strategic Air Command advertising tie Bristol Hotel Colombo Air Force Excelsior", which seemeds a little jumbled. There's a label from the Excelsior hotel in Frankfurt -Am-Maine in there too.
But the modern Hotel Bristol in Frankfurt looks as if it hasn't been there five minutes. So there was a Bristol Hotel there before...

False start to the New Year in Gurgaon Bristol

The Bristol Hotel in Gurgaon on the south side of New Delhi is one of the smartest in India, and it had a big New Year celebration planned with popular DJ rapper Honey Singh. But it didn't happen. At the last minute a complaint about his lyrics was lodged by the writer Kalpana Misra, who got up an on-line petition and sent it to the hotel's management. The petition attracted nearly 3,000 signatories and trended on Twitter. The anti-women sentiments of lyrics sung by the 28-year-old Punjabi singer, who studied music at Trinity Laban in London, were deemed particularly inappropriate after the recent horrendous Delhi gang rape, and a police report has been issued against him.
The event's organisers have not disclosed how much the cancellation has cost them, but it is thought to be no small sum.
The full story is carried in the Times of India.