From Sacher to Andreas Augustin of Famous Hotels

Frequently Vienna is our travel destination: Be it to visit family or to show Dutch friends around this charming city. Hence my more than average attention for Vienna and now some attention for Andreas Augustin who was born in Vienna in 1956 and recently paid some attention to one of my favourite grand old ladies of Hotellerie:

I am sure you don’t recognise it: No wrong! Not Istanbul, but a view from a recently added and very modern rooftop terrace of the Sacher Hotel in Vienna.

Also I believe to know something Andreas doesn’t know: A couple of years ago it was possible to have a dining party at the Naturhistorisches Museum of which you just can see the green roof dome over the green roof of the Opera. Part of the dining party was a very romantic guided tour over the roof of the museum at which you then couldn’t see yet the Sacher Roof, because it wasn’t built yet. There were rumours in Vienna that the new floor Sacher added was a bit (to?) high…

Now About Andreas:

‘I would like to leave this world
a comprehensive and reliable library
of the history of hospitality.’

He studied hotel management at the Hotel Management College at the Castle of Klesheim, Salzburg. Instead of pursuing a hotel career, he followed his life-long desire to write. He became a journalist and at 25 became the editor of his own publication, a Salzburg city magazine.

The following years as magazine reporter, newspaper columnist, radio host and international correspondent led to extensive journeys to the Orient and Far East. In 1986 he took up residence for three years at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore to study and to write about the region and the hotels of South East Asia. It was there that he developed the series of books “The Most Famous Hotels in the World”, possessed by the idea to set new standards in the field of historic research and hotel publications.

With a wonderful team of writers, historians, researchers and photographers he is building the library of hospitality. The Most Famous Hotels in the World – today with almost 400 select member hotels – has built a major value driver and creator, recognized as the leading archives of historic hotels, thus representing a major source of information to build the future of hospitality.

As President of the associated Club of The Friends of The Most Famous Hotels in the World Andreas Augustin also takes care of its members from all over the world.

His company’s website Famous Hotels will be relaunched on 28th November 2006. In the past I visited it already some times and found there a lot of useful information about the world’s most famous hotels.