Luxury Hotels Travel Wellness & Spas

Europe’s best luxury business hotel

Radisson Royal Moscow

This is the ultimate 'wedding cake', 1957 style

Radisson Royal Hotel Moscow is, quite honestly, one of the world’s most extraordinary luxury hotels – and on 2 September, 2011, World Travel Awards’ energetic founder Graham Cooke deemed it, on behalf of travel agents globally, ‘Europe’s Leading Luxury Business Hotel’.  I must admit when I stayed there it blew my mind away.

OK, so it is a typical 1957 ‘Soviet wedding cake’ building, designed by the Architectural Studio of the Ministry of Construction in the USSR in the form of architects A Mordvinov, V Kalish, P Krasilnikov, V Oltarzhevsky, as a 34-floor hotel with 1,017 bedrooms.

General Manager Wolfgang Nitschke

GM Wolfgang Nitschke with one of the thousands of genuine artworks

It reopened on 28 April 2010 as a 505-room hotel, with additional apartments. The new owners, who include Telman Ishmailov (owner of the Mardan Palace in Antalya) have spent, well, a billionaire-type fortune.

The interior has acres of polished marble, there are over 1,000 original Socialist Realism artworks, the library has 3,000 books, there is a 35-ft diameter three-dimensional diorama of Moscow and so on… The basement fitness has the world’s largest, and modern, Technogym (all Citterio design) and a 150-foot, five-lane pool with blue neon lights overhead.

Outside, on the Moskva River, the hotel has five, 200-seat year-round river boats. Hungry? Well, there are masses of in-hotel restaurants, some run by restaurateur Arkady Novikov.

The Club Lounge breakfast at Radisson Royal Hotel Moscow

The Club Lounge breakfast is a feast for caviar-holics

My room, 1061, looked across the river to the Mayor’s office. I loved the thick drapes, the Mühldorfer bed, the bathroom’s heated floor and towel rails, and everything possible is most-expensive Frette (and WiFi is free).

I also loved the 11th floor Club lounge, open 24 hours: servers there wear 1920s-type black and white tweenies uniform and breakfast is spectacular.  This luxury hotel works, and it is really businesslike.