New Bristol in St Petersburg

The new Bristol (left) and the earlier version, hitting the headlines in 1905

A new Bristol Hotel opened in St Petersburg last week. The three-star hotel is in Ulitsa Rasstanaya on the south side of the city, with parking facilities and a shuttle service to Pulkova airport. It has 120 rooms, with all mod cons and a restaurant specialising in game. The first Bristol in St Petersburg was by the Moika River, 4km north of the present hotel. It caught a revolutionary's bomb in 1906, though nobody was killed, but it did not survive the Revolution (See Hotel Bristol News)

Bristol Murano's Gio Ponti chairs for auction

This pair of 1938 Gio Ponti chairs come from the once-famous Hotel Bristol in Murano, Italy, and are up for sale at Wrights auctioneers, with an estimated price of $3,000–5,000. The hotel is the subject of a handsome book called Hotel Bristol, by photographer Elizabeth Holzl.

• The four-star Hotel Bristol in Budapest,  Hungary has just been voted one of Eastern Europe's Top 10 hotels under £30, according to research by Trivago, which carries out price comparisons.

Bristol hotel revived in Romania

Well well, another Bristol hotel has been revived in the east. The old Bristol hotel at 12 Domneasca Street in Galati has returned to its former name after being the Galati for many years under communism. The old building (right), like most in Ceaucescu's Romania, is entirely rebuilt (left) and has added a 'Le' before the Bristol - but then Romania always had pretensions towards Paris. Hotel Le Bristol could provide a pleasant place to stay in the Moldavian city on the banks of the Danube not far from the Black Sea. But somehow the old Bristol looks more inviting.

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Hotel Bristol tales on Twitter

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You can now follow Hotel Bristol tales on Twitter

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Hotel Bristol Opatija for sale

The four-star Hotel Bristol in Opatija, Croatia, is reportedly up for sale. Its Austrian owners, who also own the resort's Astoria and Opatija hotels as well as the Apoksiamen on the island of Mali Losinj, are selling the Bristol either on its own or as part of the four-hotel package. Built in 1906, this elegant, 78-room hotel was fully renovated in 2004-5 and has been on the market for a couple of years. The company has now reduced the price by 20 percent in a bid to find a buyer.

.....In the mild Kvarner Gulf, Opatija was a favourite resort of the Habsburg aristocracy, and the pioneer seaside holiday spot in the Adriatic. "Abbazia, Idylle von der Adria", a guide book to the town then known as Abbazia, appeared in 1863, and the following year the first hotel opened: the Quarnero, now the Grand Hotel Kvarner. The town has a Museum of Tourism.

The Hotel Bristol in Mexico City gets a good write-up in Lonely Planet. Built in 1970 for the World Cup, this central hotel has rooms from $US54 a night. The hotel also gets a mention in "Trotsky and the Hotel Bristol that Never Was", a story in High Times at the Hotel Bristol.

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Bristol Geneva Twitters ahead of the rest

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The World Youth Student Conference (WYSTC) is being held Manchester this week (Sept 22-25) with the theme of ‘Innovation’
Daniel Roberts, Managing Director of Xebidy, adds his thoughts on his website in an article entitled Twitter as the Travel Marketing Tool du Jour.
He writes: "Twitter is a fabulous social aggregator, which can be used to listen to a wide network of conversations. Searches can be run for your keywords against the Twitter stream and when you identify them you can jump into the conversation and help. For example, when I tweeted that I had book my flights from Manchester to Geneva for the weekend to meet a mate. Almost immediately I received a tweet from Hotel Bristol in Geneva asking if I had booked accommodation and would I like help. They would have been running a search against people who mentioned Geneva."

Havana to New Hampshire

A couple of snippets:

Eladio Monroy is the detective hero of the Canarian writer Alexis Ravelo (Tres Funerales para Eladio Monroy etc). Eladio Monroy was the name of the last president and manager of the Hotel Bristol in Havana on the corner of S. Rafael and Amisted Street, an up-market hotel popular with Americans before the revolution.

The first Hotel Bristol (formerly Jurys Bristol) to be so named in Bristol earlier this year was not the first Bristol in Bristol. There was a Bristol Hotel in Bristol, New Hampshire (pictured right). The American town, which was incorporated in 1819, took its name from the deposits of sand and clay similar to "Bristol sand" used in Britain to make fine china, pottery and Bristol Blue Glass. In New Hampshire they used it to make a high-quality brick, sold as "Bristol Brick".

Good times, bad times: Bristols brought to book

“It has left off raining down in Lincolnshire at last, and Chesney Wold has taken heart. Mrs Rouncewell is full of hospitable cares, for Sir Leicester and my Lady are coming home from Paris. The fashionable intelligence has found it out and communicates the glad tidings to benighted England… Through the same cold sunshine and the same sharp wind, my Lady and Sir Leicester, in their travelling chariot (my Lady's woman and Sir Leicester's man affectionate in the rumble), start for home. With a considerable amount of jingling and whip-cracking, and many plunging demonstrations on the part of two bare-backed horses and two centaurs with glazed hats, jack-boots, and flowing manes and tails, they rattle out of the yard of the Hôtel Bristol in the Place Vendôme and canter between the sun-and-shadow-chequered colonnade of the Rue de Rivoli and the garden of the ill-fated palace of a headless king and queen, off by the Place of Concord, and the Elysian Fields, and the Gate of the Star, out of Paris.”

From Bleak House by Charles Dickens, written in instalments in 1852–3. Dickens had stayed at the old Bristol Hôtel and visited it while writing the book. To read the story of Bristol hotels in Paris, see Suha Arafat and the Hope Diamond, chapter 19 in High Times at the Hotel Bristol.
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“By the time we reached the Bristol Hotel in Fahd Al Salem Street [Kuwait City], I had not heard a word of our sales situation in the area, and I was feeling impatient. My irritation increased as soon as I had registered in the hotel. It was the foulest hotel I was ever to visit in my years in the Gulf. It had originally been picked from a list of names.
It would have been a change from the multi-national American-inspired hostelries where I usually stayed, and anywhere in Europe the name Hotel Bristol was almost invariably an assurance of five-star quality, since they derived their name from the patronage of the well-travelled 4th Marquess who bore the title of the great English port. It transpired that this hotel Bristol was a parody of its reputation – a misnomer designed to entrap the unwary traveller – an angler’s deceit in casting his fatal fly – a travesty of all that was true.”

From Death in Riyadh: Dark Secrets in Hidden Arabia, by Geoff Carter
(Arena Books 2001)

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How Villars' Hotel Bristol brought Aitken down

Jonathan Aitken, recently put in charge of the Conservative Party’s task force on prison reform, may reflect that he owes his appointment in part to the Hotel Bristol in Villars, Switzerland (right). In 1993 Mohamad Al Fayad, owner of the Ritz hotel in Paris, told the Guardian newspaper that Aitken, then Minister of State for Defence Procurement, had been staying at his hotel, and his bill had been paid by Saudi businessman Said Ayas, adviser to King Fahd’s son, Prince Mohammed. Aitken denied this, claiming that his wife, Lolicia, had paid the bill, and he sued the paper. The case looked as it was going his way until the eleventh hour, when Al Fayad revealed the log of phone calls made by Aitken from the Ritz on the morning of his departure, including calls to the Hotel Bristol in Villars. A Guardian reporter sped to the hotel where he found its papers in boxes, as it was going through a change of ownership. For three days he sifted through them until he discovered that on the day in question Lolicia Aitken and her mother had been staying at the Swiss hotel – so they could not have been at the Ritz to pay the bill. Jailed for perjury, Aitken served seven of his 18-month jail term, providing him with the basis of his new career.
For the full story, see The Minister Who Didn't Pay his Bill

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Scandal of Victor Hervey, 6th Marquess of Bristol

LORD BRISTOL, 'CUNNING CRIMINAL'
The National Archives have recently opened their files on Victor Frederick Cochrane Hervey, 6th Marquess of Bristol, father of society limelighters Victoria and Isabella Hervey. The report by the Metropolitan Police CID, , dated January 2, 1946, came in reponse to an anonymous letter-writer's claim that he was behind "almost every jewel robbery in the metropolitan area and within areas outside London"and was "one of the most unscrupulous, calculating and cunning criminals at large". No evidence was found against him and the investigating officer concluded. "Although vicious to almost a sadistic degree, I am certain he would not be fool enough to carry firearms.". An account of the court case in which Hervey was jailed for three years for two Mayfair jewellery robberies in 1939 is the background to Paris Hilton and Victoria Hervey, one of the stories in High Times at the Hotel Bristol.

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For a full list of Bristol hotels around the world, visit ALL BRISTOL HOTELS
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Florence, Paris, Rome, Geneva, Sarajevo...

GET A TASTE OF FLORENCE...
The Helvetia & Bristol in Florence is offereing "small, intimate" lessons in Tuscan and Mediterranean cookery under its chef, Enzo Pettè. "Enzo teaches with great passion the simplicity of recreating ancient customs and traditions into a grand contemporary feast," says the hotel where his own preparations can be sampled in the Hostaria Bibendum. The afternoon classes (3–6.30pm) cost 180 euros; 160 if you attend over thee days. For information: Reservation office +39 055 2665554 or email

...and watch the fur fly
Defying the anti-fur lobby, Italian fashion house Fendi showed its winter fur collection at the hotel, with a fur coat as a raffle prize.

WHAT'S THE BEST HOTEL ANNA CHANCELLOR HAS EVER STAYED IN?
"I was filming in Paris and stayed at the Hotel Le Bristol with my daughter Poppy, who was then eight. It was lavish and unexpected and being there with Poppy felt like something out of the book 'Eloise in Paris'." – The actress ("Duckface" in Four Weddings and a Funeral) interviewed in the Daily Telegraph, September 2007
On October 10 Le Bristol was nominated EUROPE'S LEADING HOTEL at the World Travel Awards in Newcastle.

Maybe she should try Rome next...
The Hotel Bernini Bristol in the heart of Rome, has a newly renovated Presidential Suite. On the sixth-floor, it has two bedrooms, two bathrooms, two lounges, a gym and a swimming pool, with a terrace and incomparabvle views over the city, as the picture here shows...

MICHAEL PALIN DIDN'T STAY HERE
The burned out shell of the Hotel Bristol in Sarajevo, not yet recovered from the city's 1,385-day bombardment that ended in 1995, has just been bought by the Malaysian Tradewind hotel group . The company intends to renew the 15-storey 200-room hotel that featured in BBC TV's recent series on Eastern Europe with Michael Palin

MEANWHILE, BELOW STAIRS
Here is a blog about the chambermaids in the smart Hotel Bristol in Geneva where IABC (International Association of Business Communicators) have regular speednetworking evening recently. Hope they have as much fun as the chambermaids seem to have.

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Istanbul Bristol becomes the Pera Museum

The Hotel Bristol in Istanbul was built by the Greek architect Achille Manoussos in 1893. Pera, meaning “beyond” or “across” was the original Greek name for Beyoglu, the area on the opposite side of the Golden Horn from the founding city. It is where foreigners came to live and it is where the Pera Palace Hotel was built, near the Bristol, both favourites for Agatha Christie and other visitors from the Orient Express. In 2005 the Suna and Inan Kiraç Foundation renovated this historical building and turned it into the Pera Museum. It has a permanent collection of Orientalist art, with more than three hundred paintings by European artists inspired by the Ottoman world from the 17th century to the early 19th and including the delightful Tortoise Trainer. Other permanent collections include Anatolian Weights and Measures and Kütahya Tiles and Ceramics, which have lively figurative decorations. The museum also has temporary local and international art exhibitions. If you're passing that way, don't miss it.

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Bernini Bristol, Rome

The earliest known existing hotel called Bristol is thought to be the Bristol in Rome, now the Hotel Bernini Bristol.It opened its doors in 1874 and claims to be named after the 4th Earl of Bristol, who spent time in Rome acquiring artworks for his house at Ickworth in Suffolk. It was an instant success, attracting nobility and royalty.

It has been suggested that the novelist Jane Austen stayed at a Hotel Bristol in Cork Street, Mayfair, London, in 1796. From here she wrote to her sister of her alarm at arriving in the capital:

Cork Street, Tuesday morn [August 23]

My dear Cassandra
Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted...

Mayfair at this time catered for passengers from the West Country, particularly Bristol and Bath, many of whom stayed in lodging houses, male preserves that resembled sporting clubs. Despite the speculation, there was no hotel called Bristol in London until one opened on the corner of Cork Street and Burlington Gardens in 1874 – the same year as the Bristol in Rome. It is likely Jane Austen was lodging with a relative.

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