1940s

Rancho La Puerta opens in Tecate — second-oldest house in the wellness field

Swiss national gold is stored in the bunker beneath the Gstaad Palace during the war

The south becomes the free zone; artists and writers move to the coast and the Colombe d'Or becomes their meeting place

Lane Crawford’s assets are seized in occupied Hong Kong and its operations handed to Matsuzakaya

Chatuchak begins in Bangkok by government decree; it grows to fifteen thousand stalls

The Post Hotel opens at Lake Louise

Portugal opens its first pousada, at Elvas, in state-owned historic buildings

Rosy and Maria Carita reach Paris; their first salon opens in 1945 on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré

Churchill, Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek hold the Cairo Conference at Mena House in November

Umaid Bhawan is completed at Jodhpur after fifteen years, built as famine relief work

The Budapest market hall is wrecked in the war; it goes bankrupt in 1991 and is restored in 1994

Eisenhower is housed at the George V during the Liberation of Paris

Raymond Thuilier takes the Oustau de Baumanière at Les Baux-de-Provence

The Bel-Air opens in a Los Angeles canyon around a stream and swans

⚑ The Irgun bombs the wing of the King David used by the British authorities; ninety-one people are killed

Decree-Law 9,215 bans gambling throughout Brazil on 30 April; some 70 casinos close

The first Cannes Film Festival opens; the Carlton and the Martinez become its infrastructure

The Eagle Club is founded at Wasserngrat above Gstaad as a private members' ski club

The Blue Train enters service between Pretoria and Cape Town

Regent's forerunner era begins; Robert Burns founds Regent International in 1970

Pan Am forms Intercontinental Hotels to serve its own routes across Latin America

Hilton Hotels Corporation is formed; it lists on the New York Stock Exchange the following year

Ian Fleming builds GoldenEye at Oracabessa, where he wrote the Bond novels

Ian Fleming's villa at GoldenEye becomes the Fleming Villa

Loews is founded by the Tisch brothers

Roy Kelley opens his first Waikiki hotel; Outrigger grows from it

Bemelmans Bar opens at the Carlyle; Ludwig Bemelmans paints the murals for a year's board

Vila Bled becomes Tito's summer residence; it opens as a hotel in 1984

The Asaka-no-miya summer villa at Karuizawa is sold to Tsutsumi Yasujirō and reopens as the Prince Hotel — the chain takes its name from the princes whose land it bought

Yekutiel and Samuel Federmann buy the twenty-one-room Kaete Dan guesthouse on the Tel Aviv seafront

The Phoenicia opens outside the city gate — Malta’s first grand hotel, begun before the war and finished after it

Christian Dior shows the New Look — the fashion maison enters hospitality's future customer base

Statler Hotels buys the Hotel Pennsylvania outright from the Pennsylvania Railroad and renames it the Hotel Statler

Villa La Massa opens on the Arno outside Florence in a Medici villa

Conrad Hilton forms Hilton International

The Gritti Palace opens in the sixteenth-century residence of Doge Andrea Gritti

Lucia Fiorentino and Peppino Arcucci build La Fontelina on the rocks at Capri

Conrad Hilton acquires the Waldorf Astoria

Chanut Piyaoui opens the Princess Hotel in Bangkok in May — a pool and air conditioning, rare in the city

Yves Montand and Simone Signoret meet at the Colombe d'Or

Conrad Hilton acquires the Waldorf Astoria; the brand becomes a Hilton line

The Caribe Hilton opens in San Juan — the first Hilton outside the continental United States