Hotels are for showing off. Owners figure that a good way to attract customers is to impress them by outdoing the competition with the biggest, the tallest, the most abundant, the most luxurious, and, in some cases, the strangest.
We took a dive into the Guinness World Records to compile this superlative collection of currently unsurpassed hotel champs in categories ranging from the significant to the super-specific to the simply silly.
Pictured in foreground above: China's Jin Mao Tower, home of the Grand Hyatt Shanghai
(Credit: Benson Kua / Flickr)
Largest and Smallest
Malaysia’s First World Hotel (pictured above) holds the record for largest hotel by number of rooms—it has 7,351 of them, spread across two gargantuan towers in the Genting Highlands resort complex. The place’s brightly colored Lego-block look probably doesn’t fit anybody’s definition of tasteful, but then, why would you expect classy understatement from a behemoth?
Contrast that Goliath with the world’s smallest hotel, Trafo-Haus in the German town of Bad Segeberg north of Hamburg. The entire hotel measures just 192 square feet, spread across three narrow stories containing a kitchenette, a sitting area, a bathroom, and a double bed under a glass roof.
(Credit: 663highland [CC BY 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons)
Oldest
The record for longevity goes to Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan in Yamanashi Prefecture southwest of Tokyo. The 35-room inn has been in continuous operation since 705 A.D.—that’s more than 30 years before the birth of Charlemagne.
In the hotel’s 1,300-year history, visitors ranging from samurai warriors to modern-day tourists have sought its remote location at the foot of the Akaishi Mountains (the famous Mount Fuji is about 2.5 hours away by car) to sample the principal attraction: a series of hot springs that have fed the hotel’s pools from the beginning. Perhaps most incredibly of all, the inn has been in the same family for 52 generations.
Tallest and Highest
Guinness makes a distinction between the tallest and highest hotels. Tallest is for skyscrapers that serve as hotels from top to bottom; highest is for those that sit at the apex of mixed-use buildings that might also contain residential and office space.
The winner in the tall category is the Gevora Hotel in Dubai, a city that collects world records like a hipster collects vinyl ones. The 75-floor, golden-hued tower reaches a height of 1,169 feet. As impressive as that is, another Dubai hotel, the Ciel, is expected to break the record when it opens later in 2025. The under-construction property will have a height of over 1,197 feet.
As for the highest hotel, that distinction belongs to the Rosewood Guanzhou in China. The luxury property occupies the top 16 floors of the 111-story, 1,738-feet-tall CTF Finance Centre, the third-tallest building in China and the eighth-tallest in the world. Fortunately for hotel guests, the structure has the world's speediest elevators, traveling at a zippy 47 mph.
For the record (pun intended), the hotel situated at the highest point above sea level, according to Guinness, is Bolivia's Hotel Tayka del Desierto, located at a head-spinning altitude of 15,091 feet in the Siloli Desert.
Largest 3D Painting
The façade of the Karelia Business Hotel in St. Petersburg, Russia, resembles a gigantic suitcase propped on its side and starting to open. At 168,800 square feet, it is the world’s largest three-dimensional painting and, presumably, the sort of thing that airport baggage handlers see in their nightmares.
Dinner and Drinks
Many of the food-related world records set at hotels were onetime stunts, such as the cooking of the largest falafel (224 pounds, at the Hilton Dead Sea Resort & Spa in Jordan), the making of the longest fruitcake (2,078 feet, at the Rixos Premium Tekirova hotel in Turkey), the most carrots chopped in an hour (496 pounds' worth, at the Royal Castle Hotel in Torquay, England), and the farthest squirting of milk from the eye (9 feet, 2 inches, achieved by Ilker Yilmaz at the Armada Hotel in Istanbul).
But there are some culinary champs that hotel guests can experience in person, including the cuisine of the most Michelin-starred chef alive, Alain DuCasse, who oversees restaurants at the Dorchester hotel in London and the Hôtel de Paris Monte-Carlo in Monaco.
(Credit: Fudoc / Flickr)
Longest Laundry Chute
The Grand Hyatt Shanghai in China is set near the tip-top of the 88-floor Jin Mao Tower. Guests are treated to dazzling views of the city and, in the lobby, a soaring, 30-story circular atrium (pictured above) that seems designed to evoke awe and vertigo at the same time.
But the world record the hotel holds is a behind-the-scenes feature. The laundry chute stretches all the way from the 87th floor to the basement of the tower—a total distance of more than 1,080 feet. That’s taller than D.C.’s Washington Monument, the Great Pyramid of Giza, and Shaquille O’Neal combined.
Most Expensive Guest Room
No place does the obscenely expensive thing like New York City, home of the world's priciest hotel suite: the penthouse at the Mark Hotel, which will set you back an ungodly $114,767 per night. For that astronomical sum, you'll get six bathrooms, a living room/ballroom with a 26-foot-high ceiling, a private gym, a library, and your own outdoor terrace. Adds Guinness: "Breakfast is included." It better be.
(Credit: imagea.org)
Largest Ice Structure
Each winter, a million cubic feet of ice and snow from the Torne river in northern Sweden are sculpted into the Icehotel of Jukkasjärvi, a tiny village located about 120 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Though there are similar frozen lodgings in Quebec, Norway, and elsewhere, Sweden’s is the biggest ice structure of any kind, measuring a total of 59,200 square feet.
This isn’t any old igloo, either. Guests can make use of a subzero bar (where even the glasses are made of ice) or a hushed chapel before retiring to themed guest rooms filled with original ice sculptures. We can guarantee that the artwork is ultra-new—that’s one benefit of a hotel that melts every spring.
First Underwater Hotel
Talk about sleeping with the fishes. Jules’ Undersea Lodge sits at the bottom of the Emerald Lagoon in Key Largo, Florida. In 1986, the onetime research laboratory was converted to the world’s first completely underwater hotel. To reach it, PADI-certified guests have to scuba dive down about 30 feet and enter through a "moon pool" underneath the structure.
Though a little cramped, the submerged hideaway isn’t without comforts, including air conditioning, hot showers, and pizza delivery, courtesy of a wetsuit-wearing room service attendant. The top draw, however, has to be the views of colorful marine life swimming by the aqua-cottage’s large windows.
An earlier version of this article, published Jan. 2, 2018, has been updated for 2025.