Best of Budapest & Hungary

During the past ten years, the hotel hosted lots of world famous people, including singers, actors, politicians, presidents and sportsmen. The staff will always remember opera singer Placido Domingo’s visits or those challenging days when George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States took over the hotel for his state visit in 2006. Since 2000, the hotel accommodated up to 1 million guests coming from all over the world, who consumed around 400 000 pieces of croissants for breakfast in the hotel’s Le Bourbon restaurant that used 20 tons of flour to bake its fine cakes so well known in the city. This was the very first hotel in Hungary to receive the prestigious Five Star Diamond Award from the American Academy of Hospitality Sciences. 

“Bringing some ‘French touch’ to Budapest through food, cheese & wine and culture, offering personalized and tailor made services to our guests, and finally the various charity activities focused on sick and underprivileged children, are those three key landmarks of the hotel’s life that must be emphasized,” General Manager Adrian Gray said. “Once, Starwood colleagues took part in a conference here in Budapest whose program included a visit and set of activities to support the Pediatric hospital in Tűzoltó utca, a unit of Semmelweis University. These programs included meeting the children, completing drawings and paintings for the walls and chairs of the hospital, in addition to recultivating the children’s garden and playground in the 42 degrees heat. When it turned out that the hospital was missing over EUR 24,000 to complete the new wards for the immunology section of the hospital they immediately started to raise funds in their own hotels. Three months later the hospital received a cheque from Le Meridien Budapest and Starwood Hotels and Resorts, to cover the costs of the renovation works,” Gray noted.

Special 10th Anniversary offers and programs for October include discount booking (if you book Friday-Saturday this month at Le Méridien Budapest for 2010 or 2011, you will pay only EUR 10 for Sunday.) and pastry lessons every Wednesdays with Pastry chef István Mázás. Also, during this week, at the entrance of the hotel, visitors will find exposed old photos of the historic building of Le Méridien and photos of celebrities having stayed in the hotel in the past 10 years.

About the building:

1918: Birth of protected monument Adria Palace which housed the Adria Insurance Company + Luxurious shops and studio + 14 high standard apartments. The façade was richly ornamented by ten marble statues symbolizing the different insurance branches.

1950: Budapest Police Headquarter moves in. Budapest Citizens remember well those years when several political dissidents were imprisoned in the building, in the cell which, according to the archives, was located in the basement of the hotel, level of today’s ballroom. The building overlooks a square, originally named Erzsébet in 1857 after Queen Elisabeth (Sissi), which was later changed to Stalin, after communist leader Joseph Stalin, then to Engels, after Friedrich Engels, father of the communism (alongside Karl Marx).