The other day I was walking around Oslo when I passed a fancy building with a red carpet, black awning and a name in big capital letters: Hotel Bristol. I was mystified. Bristol? In Oslo?
Well, it turns out that the Hotel California is in Paris, that the Manhattan Hotel is in Jakarta and that the Hotel Vienna exists pretty much everywhere except in Vienna.
I thought it would all come down to marketing. But the more I explored, the more I saw three stories unfolding: location, aspiration, and old-world tradition.
Follow along for a fun data analysis into the world of hotels that borrow city names from somewhere else. The results? Way more surprising than I expected.
What are the top hotel names?
After I was back from my Oslo trip, I just couldn’t let it go. So I did what I do best: develop a mild obsession and open far too many tabs. On one of those tabs, I came across the Hotel Data API from liteAPI, who were very kind to let me use their data for this analysis.
Here’s how I went about it:
I ran a global search for hotel names that referenced major cities, but weren’t actually in them. For each city name (say, Roma), I looped through every country code and pulled hotels with that name anywhere in the world.
The code below illustrates how to extract data for a list of cities. It uses a function called launch_requests to handle the API queries, which I won’t share here—details on querying the API and obtaining keys are available in the official documentation.
# Loop through each city name in your list (e.g., Paris, Vienna, Rome)
citylist=["Paris","Vienna","Rome"]
for city in citylist:
print('Starting extraction for', city)
results=[]
# Loop through each country code (e.g., US, FR, DE) from your DataFrame,
# Please source your own list of countrycodes for this!
for alpha in countrycodes['alpha-2']:
print(alpha)
# Construct the API request URL with the current country and city name
# + Filters.
url = (
"https://api.liteapi.travel/v3.0/data/hotels"
"?countryCode="+alpha+
"&hotelName="+city+
"&limit=5000"
"&hotelTypeIds=201%2C203%2C204%2C205%2C206%2C208%2C219%2C231"
)
# Launch the request and append the result to the list
results.append(launch_requests(url))
# Combine all responses for the current city into a single DataFrame
df_all = pd.concat(results, ignore_index=True)
# Save the results as a CSV named after the city
df_all.to_csv(str(city) + '_24_04.csv')
I filtered for exact matches to keep things clean, so “Hotel romantic” didn’t sneak in as a false Roma. I also further tagged the results with “incity” where the hotel is based in the same city as the name (e.g Hotel Roma in Rome), “inaddress” when the hotel is on a street named after a city (e.g Hotel Roma on Roma Street) and “outside” for everything else.
As for the city names, aside from the obvious Bristol, I picked them based on vibe rather than geography.
I started the list with old-world charm: London, Rome and Paris. Sun by the poolside? That’s Miami, California, Barcelona and Havana. I threw in Venice, Prague and Vienna for some elegance. Marrakesh, Casablanca and Cairo? Exotic and mysterious. And finished with cosmopolitan: Manhattan, Berlin and Shanghai.
To illustrate, take the beautiful lobby of The Parisian Macao, a Paris-themed hotel in, you guessed it, Macao, China.
And now, the big reveal… Below is the definitive list of the most borrowed city names used in hotel names all over the world. Think of it as the Olympics of city names that look good on a hotel room key.
But before we get to the full table, here’s a map of the top 7 finishers and, of course, the reason behind this article, the mysterious Bristol. Each dot is a real hotel, so feel free to zoom in, filter and watch the points appear across borders.
My biggest surprise? The big concentration of City Name hotels in Europe compared to the small scatter in North America. What are hotels called after in NA? Maybe content for another article?
Now, back to the numbers, here’s how to read the table (If you’re curious, I used the library PlotTable).
- Hotel Name: The City mentioned in the hotel’s name.
- Number of Countries: How many countries have hotels with this name.
- Number of Hotels: Total hotels worldwide with this name.
- In city: How many are actually located in the real city.
- In Address: How many are on a street or area with the same name.
- Outside: The rest and the interesting bit – hotels borrowing the name but located nowhere near the actual place.
And the winner is…
Paris, the city of light and love, comes out on top with over 1100 hotels all over the world. Enough to book a new one each weekend for 20 years?
Not far behind is Vienna, quite a surprise, especially in China, where the name is a massive hit.
At number three is Rome, where it feels like there’s Hotel Roma in just about every town in Italy.
And I do wonder, is this really due to the luxury and charm that these cities evoke? — or that some names just sound “expensive”? Let’s deep dive in the next section.
Why do hotels borrow city names?
Sometimes — and as a frugal traveller I can vouch for this — it’s not about being in the city, it’s about being close enough. Take Mestre, the mainland neighbour of Venice. Many hotels there brand themselves with “Venice” in the name to appear in travel searches. For example, the “Hilton Garden Inn Venice Mestre San Giuliano” is far more likely to show up when someone googles “places to stay in Venice”. Check out the following map, which illustrates all hotels near Venice that include ‘Venice’ in their name.
Same thing happens with Paris. Many hotels are located outside the official city limits, but close enough so you still feel like you’re on holiday in Paris. Maybe even close enough to smell that five Euro coffee in front of the Eiffel Tower.
Other times, the name has little to do with geography and everything to do with the music played in the lobby.
I am talking about the Vienna Hotels Group, founded in 1993 in Shenzhen, China. The founder chose the name “Vienna” to sell elegance, comfort and classical music—a European fantasy.
To this day, many of their hotels adopt a European-inspired branding style with neoclassical columns, chandeliers and classical piano music played in the lobby. Hard to resist, right?
In fact, when I look at the data, China alone accounts for almost 1000 hotels that include Vienna in their name, far more than any country, including Austria itself.
Other fun examples of branding are the Manhattan Hotel in Jakarta:
The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, which you couldn’t pay me enough to go to:
And just look at the Miami Heat Beach Resort in Bataan, Philippines.
Not every hotel is named to sell a location or a fantasy. Some are named out of pure tradition.
Let’s go back to the name that started this whole journey: Bristol.
The first thing that I did was to map out every Hotel Bristol – just scroll up to see the interactive map yourself. The result? Not a single Hotel Bristol in the UK outside of the City of Bristol.
The hotels are rather scattered across Europe and even as far as South America. So I wondered: how far are these hotels from the actual city of Bristol?
Here’s how I measured it:
- I calculated the distance from each hotel’s coordinates to the coordinates of Bristol.
# Compute the distance (in km) between each hotel and the city center of Bristol.
# The 'bristol' DataFrame contains one hotel per row, with 'latitude' and 'longitude' columns.
origin=(51.4545,-2.5879)
bristol['distance_km']=bristol.apply(lambda row:distance(
origin,
(row['latitude'],row['longitude'])
).km, axis=1)
2. I then plotted the distribution of those distances alongside Paris and Vienna, using Seaborn’s FacetGrid as a RidgePlot. The code (too long for this article) is based on Thiago Carvalho’s guide in Plain English.
The results speak for themselves:
- Paris hotels are, on average, just 22km from the actual city, mostly location-driven, as we explored in the first section.
- Vienna hotels average 8,416km away — a clear case of fun branding.
- Bristol hotels? They sit at an average of 1,649km from Bristol — way too far for location to be the reason.
So, what’s the real story here? For that, I turn to Roger Williams, a journalist and author of “High Times at the Bristol Hotel”, a book that explores the fascinating origins of Bristol Hotels around the globe.
Williams talks about an 18th-century English nobleman, Lord Bristol. He was known as a true connoisseur of art and travel, and his visits often elevated a place’s status: hotels where he stayed would even become informally known as “Lord Bristol’s Hotel.” This, it turns out, was how the very first Hotels Bristol opened across Europe. Later, other hotels adopted the name, either to sound sophisticated and luxurious, or, as the owner of Le Bristol in Paris said back in 1925, simply to keep up an old tradition that went all the way back to the 18th century.
It’s more than just a name
This journey started with a simple question about the Hotel Bristol in Oslo, a name that felt strangely out of place. It all started with one hotel, but soon I was mapping names across the world. What began as just city names turned into a story about geography, branding, and even a bit of old European tradition. Here’s a summary of what we found:
- Paris is the city with the most hotel names to its name. Most of them aren’t even in Paris —the average “Paris Hotel” is 22km away from the actual city.
- Vienna came next. But it’s not just a city—it’s also a Chinese hotel brand with close to 1,000 locations, all selling a refined, classical, European fantasy.
- Rome is third, and it turns out hotels all across Italy love naming themselves after the capital. Location or aspiration? Maybe both.
What all of this shows is that hotel names are rarely random. They’re selling a location, a fantasy, or—sometimes—a tradition.
And yes, the cat’s out of the bag: there are over 200 Hotels Bristol worldwide, and the reason goes all the way back to an 18th-century English aristocrat whose hotel preferences turned into a naming tradition.
So next time you find yourself staying at a London in Uruguay, a Rome in Lisbon or a Barcelona in Mexico—you’ll know there’s probably more to that name than meets the eye. And now, you know how to start uncovering it.
All images and code in this article are by the author
