London’s hotel market is experiencing a strong period of luxury hotel openings, challenging rates and testing the resilience of high spending travellers visiting the UK capital, as they get an increasingly broad choice of places to stay.
According to specialist hospitality advisors Whitebridge Hospitality, London is facing a wave of luxury hotel launches, “with most flying the international flags of well known brands”. Following the pandemic, it notes openings really scaled up in 2023, with the arrival into the market of the 1Hotel Mayfair, Raffles in the former War Office buildings, the Chelsea Townhouse, The Peninsula and At Sloane. Between them, these added more than 550 rooms to London’s luxury inventory.
A strong opening schedule
In the first half of 2024, more arrivals joined the fray, including the 55 room Mandarin Oriental Mayfair, and 60 room Emory, from the Maybourne hotel group. Further planned 2024 launches, Whitebridge notes, include the 203 room Park Hyatt River Thames.
Whitebridge, in partnership with construction, property and management consultancy Rider Levett Bucknall, and data specialist HotStats, analyses key hotel metrics in detail, on a regular basis. Its summer 2024 report notes some weakening in rates, compared with the same months in 2023. However, occupancy has been higher, offsetting that and the report declares: “The half time score would suggest that the London luxury segment is in rude health and absorbing its new siblings with enthusiasm.”
Looking further ahead into 2025, the market will see the arrival of a Six Senses in Bayswater; plus hotels from Rosewood, Marriott’s St Regis, Hilton’s Waldorf Astoria brand and an Auberge property. Many of these projects see imaginative reuse of landmark properties in the UK capital.
The Waldorf Astoria, due to open in the first half of 2025, is set in Admiralty Arch. Many of the 96 rooms in the hotel, converted from what were government offices, will have views along The Mall to Buckingham Palace, or across Trafalgar Square. Rosewood Chancery will see the conversion of the former United States Embassy, while the St Regis will be created from the refurbishment of the Westbury hotel in Mayfair.
Repurposing London landmarks
And the UK’s first Six Senses hotel is being created from a former department store building, with elegant Art Deco architectural features. More recently the property was a retail arcade, before developers spotted the opportunity to transform its elegant spaces into a 109 room hotel, with 14 branded residences.
In mid 2024, developers the Reuben brothers appointed Auberge Collection to take on Cambridge House, a new hotel being created on Piccadilly. The property will feature at its core the former In and Out Military Club, in Mayfair. The site has been waiting for many years to be reused, and in its new incarnation will be a 102 room hotel with private members club. The Reubens are promising the design will have a classic English feel, “yet drawing on the eclectic influences that have made Great Britain what it is today”.
