Travellers' ChecksTravel deals: Colombo's Galle Face Hotel gets facelift; Rosewood Beijing offers white Christmas package
Adam Nebbs
The Galle Face Hotel (above), in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, has just undergone the most extensive renovation in its 151-year history, with 72 rooms and suites, restaurants, bars, executive wing and the lobby of the north wing completely refurbished over the past two and a half years. This venerable old property, opened by four British businessmen in 1864, is often cited, notably by Wikipedia and consequently many travel articles, as "the oldest hotel east of Suez", although it may not even be the oldest hotel in Sri Lanka. The Hotel Suisse in Kandy, also owned and managed by Galle Face Hotel Management, is said to have opened, albeit as a guesthouse called Haramby House, in 1850, and the Astor House Hotel (now the Astor Hotel) opened in the northern Chinese city of Tientsin (now Tianjin) in 1863. Trumping both these properties, however, and laying to rest all other oldest-east-of-Suez hotel claims is the Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, a Japanese hot-spring resort northwest of Mount Fuji, which opened for business 1,310 years ago in 705, and is recognised as the world's oldest hotel by Guinness World Records.
Cathay Pacific has just closed its first- and business-class lounges (above) at London's Heathrow Airport for renovations that are not expected to be completed until the end of June. In the meantime, passengers will have to make do with British Airways and American Airlines facilities and the open-to-all Heathrow No1 Lounge in Terminal 3. Our de facto flagship carrier is also rumoured to be making a return to Britain's Gatwick Airport sometime after the arrival of the first of its new Airbus A350-900 aircraft in February. Cathay first began flying to London with Boeing 747-200 flights to Gatwick via Bahrain in July 1980. Non-stop services started in 1984. The first Heathrow flights began in 1991 and Gatwick was abandoned in 1993.
