Making Of

By 1998 our series of books about historic hotels (modestly started with Singapore’s Raffles in 1986) had grown into a ‘library of hospitality’. ‘The Most Famous Hotels in the World’ had become an established brand. We had our homepage on the internet. From researchers and authors we had become consultants, developers and strategic planners. Identified as a sustainable asset, history had grown into a major marketing tool. In 1999, almost 300 hotels were listed all over the world. Meanwhile, famoushotels.org was officially an organisation. 

At that point we met Erhard Noreisch, General Manager of the Imperial Austria AG and Vice President of Sheraton East- and Central Europe (left). In this position he was in charge of the most established Austrian hotel, the Imperial. He was also managing – with a hotel manager - the Bristol. He liked the idea of having books about the history of these two hotels, both Viennese institutions of the highest order. The hotels had a rich history, but nothing had been collated. However, the archives were in the city and a priceless collection of material awaited us at the hotel itself.

Being called in to produce a book about a hotel which has a ‘well established’ history sounds like a piece of cake. We even found a photograph of the actual construction of the hotel (right). But sometimes the proven legends lead to unexpected surprises. Is everybody happy to accept the truth, when we discover that distributed facts are not correct? This affects marketing strategies; sometimes entire advertising campaigns have to be pulped. General managers certainly have different ways of reacting.

The Imperial Connection:

Legend had it that the Imperial in 1873 had been personally opened by the Austrian Emperor himself, who bestowed the honour of the Imperial name upon the hotel. The Bristol, the other hotel in the chain, had opened in 1892 and got its name from nobody less than the Earl of Bristol, who considered it worthy of bearing his aristocratic name.
Good stories to start with.
But were they true or had they simply supplied good PR for over a century?
We expressed our doubts.
Without hesitating, General Manager Erhard Noreisch gave us carte blanche to do the necessary research ... 

Upon starting this exciting adventure, Petra Engl-Wurzer, the director of public relations for both hotels, opened the archives for us. With Petra, who holds a PhD in Public Relations, Journalism and Communication, we would develop a series of new gadgets for the hotel industry, that made the life of travelling journalists a lot easier. One of them was the Traveller’s Notepad, a digital press kit that revolutionised the classic hotel’s press kit. This system is today in its eighth year and still making the work of thousands of journalists easier every year. 

But back to square one.

Records had been either kept in the hotel’s safe or saved by thoughtful minds. One of them was chief concierge Michael Moser (left), a treasure trove of good anecdotes and a splendid conversation partner. Many a rare document has been saved by his hands, pulling it out from bins at the last moment, rescuing it from careless office staff with little sense of history. 
In the safes of the hotel guest books from the early 20th century had been kept in good shape, bearing the signatures of some of the most notable figures in history. Hotel anecdotes spanned from the visit of the German Prince Bismarck to that of the composer Richard Wagner. The photographic archives released rare documents from the sojourns of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth of England and the Shah of Persia. And in Vienna history is alive: we found a cameraman whose father had shot Charlie Chaplin’s arrival and a room-service waiter who once served the Soviet leader Kruschev.

Also very much alive was the legend that His Imperial Highness, Emperor Franz Joseph (left) personally opened the hotel. It was published in various advertisements and a solid cornerstone of the hotel’s PR line. Again we dug deep. We searched the public archives, wanting to confirm the event with some hard facts. We checked the diaries of the imperial court: no trace of the emperor being close to the Imperial that day. In fact, he wasn’t there for years. And he had nothing to do with the name giving. The name was French, which was the lingua franca of the upper class at the time. Maybe it was meant to be English, but certainly not German. The German version would have been Kaiser or kaiserlich like in Kaiserhof. 

His Apostolic Majesty, Emperor Franz Joseph personally crowned the hotel some years later, in 1879, with an ‘imperial’ visit. Prince Bismarck was in the city at the time discussing an alliance with Count Andrássy of Hungary in one of the parlours on the second floor.  Only then did Franz Joseph choose to go to the Imperial – a mark of great respect to his honoured guest. 

We presented the new facts to the management. Erhard Noreisch and Petra Engl-Wurzer realised the consequences: changes to the existing PR and advertising lines. The sentence ‘Opened by the Emperor . . . ‘ had to be dropped. They chose the truth and got many other great stories in return. This makes the first sentence on the copyright- and thank-you page of the Imperial Vienna book much easier to understand: ‘It must be noted with the greatest respect that the management of the hotel decided to accept historical facts rather than old legends and traditionally distributed myth.’

The resulting book is today in its fifth edition and still growing year by year. Every now and again we find new anecdotes around the coffee house and its intellectual clientele. Only recently we stumbled over the photographs of Jak Tuggener, who left us priceless pictures from the night of a big ball at the hotel in the 1950s. The Imperial as the official guesthouse of the Republic of Austria is still under the wing of senior vice president and area director Erhard Noreisch, with general manager Thomas Schön at the helm.

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