The jewel in the crown of Monaco’s hotel scene was recently given a little extra sparkle thanks to a restoration in 2017. This includes a new Princess Grace Suite, an artfully decorated two-floor apartment which pays homage to the late royal’s style, complete with terraces and an infinity pool from which to gaze across the city. Pictured is Lewis Hamilton driving in front of the hotel during a trial session for the F1 Grand Prix in Monte Carlo in 2008.

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The Savoy today has modernised, yet it’s retained the old-school glamour people know and love. In 2007, it underwent a thorough renovation, with designers using archive images to weave in Edwardian and Art Deco styles. The hotel has to keep its lips sealed about famous guests staying there today, but it’s been used for Taylor Swift’s music videos and Rihanna wrote the album Talk That Talk in one of its suites.

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Opening in 1911, the Carlton Hotel provided a fashionable retreat for wealthy holiday-goers in the French Riviera. Its early clientele included British and Russian aristocrats, as well as political figures, who came here for the first Conference of the League of Nations in 1922. The first official Cannes Film Festival was held in 1946 and since then the Carlton has welcomed a whole host of screen stars through its doors. Shown here are Roger Moore and Barbara Bach, stars of The Spy Who Loved Me, outside the hotel in 1977.

Not only a place for celebrities to rest their heads, the Carlton was used as a filming location by Alfred Hitchcock, who shot Grace Kelly and Cary Grant here in To Catch A Thief (1955). Kelly met Prince Rainier in Cannes the following year and became a frequent visitor to the hotel, leading to the creation of a suite in homage to her. Morgan Freeman is seen here during a photo shoot at the hotel in 2000. 

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Despite being one of London’s grandest hotels today, Claridge’s had decidedly more humble beginnings. It was a single-terraced building when it first opened as a hotel in 1812, before being purchased by William and Marianne Claridge in 1854, who expanded and renamed it. Royal guests including Queen Victoria and Prince Albert amped up its star status in the latter half of the 19th century. But it was a makeover in the 1890s by new owner Richard D'Oyly Carte, owner of the Savoy, that catapulted it to the height of glamour. Pictured is Alfred Hitchcock in the restaurant in 1943.

You might be wondering which came first: the Hotel Sacher or the Sacher-Torte? Turns out it was the latter, created in 1832 by pastry chef Franz Sacher, whose son Eduard went on to open the eponymous hotel in 1876. This Vienna institution, pictured in 1910, was grand from the get-go, allowing well-heeled guests to visit the nearby Vienna State Opera or feast on the famous cake in the Sacher Café. 

The Dorchester Hotel recently celebrated its 90th anniversary, having opened its doors in April 1931. Located on the swanky Park Lane, the sleek steel-and-concrete building stood out against London’s ornate Victorian era-hotels at the time. In fact, the reinforced concrete would make it one of the capital’s safest buildings during the Second World War. In the Postwar years it hosted plenty of screen stars, including Audrey Hepburn, pictured in 1954 with American actor husband Mel Ferrer.

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Attracting a literary crowd in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, F. Scott Fitzgerald is known to have used it as the inspiration for the Hôtel des Étrangers in novel Tender is the Night (1934). Famous romances have blossomed here over the years too, including that between Rita Hayworth and Aly Khan, and Joseph P Kennedy’s affair with Marlene Dietrich.