Phoenicia Hotel reopens one of its main buildings on Oct. 3. (Credit: D.R.)
BEIRUT — It's official: the Phoenicia, the capital's emblematic five-star hotel, damaged by the Aug. 4, 2020, blast that ravaged swathes of Beirut adjacent the port area, will reopen Oct. 3, the hotel's management confirmed to L'Orient-Le Jour.
"The decision to open in October was taken about six months ago, and the building that houses the rooms started operating again last July," said Manrique Rodriguez, the general manager of the hotel that belongs to the Société des grands hôtels du Liban (SGHL), owned by the Salha family.
By reopening the Phoenicia Tower, one of the three buildings on the site, the Phoenicia is returning 193 rooms to Lebanon's luxury hotel market, including three presidential suites, as well as all the available banquet rooms, three restaurants (Mosaic, Amethyst and Cascade), and a sports complex reserved for hotel guests and subscribers. The third building (the 253-room Roman Tower) is still under construction and no date has yet been set for its reopening.
"The hotel suffered significant damage and had to close its doors as of Aug. 5, 2020. The rehabilitation project took a long time to be launched," Rodriguez said, without disclosing rehabilitation costs.
Before the explosions, the hotel employed around 800 people. Hotel management told L'Orient-Le Jour that, of the 350 people who make up the hotel's workforce today, 70 percent are former employees. "We have kept a small number of full-time staff to sustain the hotel, while we kept other employees on part-time — with social security and medical coverage — and most of them will be recalled to work today," said Rodriguez.
For the Phoenicia's management, the decision to reopen the hotel while Lebanon is undergoing a disastrous economic and financial crisis is far from being a losing bet, especially since the summer season was rather successful for Lebanon's tourism. The Tourism Ministry expected around 1.2 million visitors in July, "75 percent" of whom are Lebanese expatriates.
"We already have reservations for Nov. and Dec., and another for one of the banquet halls on Oct. 1 [for festivities organized on the occasion of the national holiday of Nigeria, editor's note]," the hotel manager said.
The crisis and port blast have forced a large number of Beirut's luxury hotels to shut. The Phoenicia has been heavily damaged or destroyed three times since it was founded: once at the start of the civil war in 1975; a second time in the explosion that killed former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005; and on Aug. 4, 2020.
This story was originally published in French in L'Orient-Le Jour.