The fastest, highest, most historic and Instagramable elevators in the world’s luxury hotels

Lifts, elevators – call them what you will, but almost all guests use them, so the chances of rubbing shoulders with someone famous in those of a luxury hotel are not negligible. In the lifts at the Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong, for example, I’ve been joined by tennis legend John McEnroe and philosopher/author Alain de Botton.

A (now former) employee of Hong Kong’s Grand Hyatt once told me that whenever David Beckham stayed, he preferred to use the service elevator, presumably to avoid overzealous fans. And the PR director for one of Hong Kong’s top hotels confided that the “close” buttons in the property’s lifts were not connected, so as to foil Hongkongers’ fondness for closing the doors on approaching fellow patrons.

Many of the world’s first powered passenger lifts were to be found in hotels. The now closed Hongkong Hotel unveiled the then colony’s first “ascending room” in 1888. The Pera Palace hotel in Turkey is home to Istanbul’s first lift, which is still in action and would have once hauled author Agatha Christie up and down to her room – the property was opened in 1895 for passengers travelling on the Orient Express. And the world’s first outdoor glass elevator opened at the El Cortez hotel in San Diego, in the United States, in 1956.

Hotel lifts continue to break new ground. The recently opened J Hotel in Shanghai is the loftiest hotel in the world, situated as it is across the top floors of the 632m (2,073 foot) Shanghai Tower. Four lifts ascend from the first-floor, street-level entrance to the 101st floor lobby (at 470m above sea level), with speeds reaching 18 metres a second – that’s a record-breaking 64.9km/h (40.3 miles per hour).

As well as being showcases for innovation and history, hotel elevators have been used as canvases for artist expression and whimsy.