“It helps when your government makes it easy for inward investment,” says Yves Giacometti, general manager of the Four Seasons Gresham Palace, Budapest, Hungary.
After over nine years at the 179-key hotel, and with no intention of moving on, the Parisian knows who the local players are. “I do not need to go and see them. They meet here in the hotel, especially in our all-day Kollazs Brasserie & Bar, which conveniently has several semi-private corners, plus, for privacy, a street entrance off Zrínyi Utca,” he explained.
This all helps local business people as well as international money men, often Hungarian diaspora, who want to invest in the country, and it seems rules and regulations are at the minimum of the international scale. More than 80% of incoming public investment funds comes from EU cohesion funds, but a significant contribution is from another source as well.
“Take the movie industry, which last year gave us 9% of our total room nights. There are several studios nearby, of which the largest, Origo Film Group, has nine complete soundstages. The government gives all the support the studios need for such movies as ‘Atomic Blonde,’ ‘Blade Runner 2049’ (in which director Denis Villeneuve used Budapest’s former Stock Exchange as a Los Angeles casino) and ‘Evita.’ That helps us as the key names and other stars stay in-house for several weeks, as do the producers,” Giacometti shared.
He professionally never names names but it is known that Harrison Ford, Tom Hanks, Rosamund Pike and Charlize Theron have been working in Budapest in the past few years. It is also common knowledge that some scenes of the 2015 movie ‘Spy,’ with Jude Law, were shot in the hotel’s lobby.
“Yes, this is a business-friendly city, but it is overall friendly anyway (you can visit many of the movie studios, which is one of the many draws we are using to attract millennials, especially from Asia, to experience Budapest),” he continued.
All ages love coming to the hotel, both for business and leisure (58% of guests are from North America). It was built, right by the city’s famous Chain Bridge across the Danube, in 1906, for Gresham Life Assurance. Having survived, despite batterings, World Wars I and II, and the 1956 Hungarian revolution, it was briefly the headquarters of the Red Army: Now, it is widely renowned as one of the most beautiful historical hotels in the whole of Europe.
Eighty of its 315-strong workforce have been here since the hotel’s 2004 opening. Their boss had, interestingly, not originally envisaged becoming a hotelier. After getting a master’s in civic law at the University of Law in Paris, Giacometti diverted. Having traveled widely, with his investor father, and with a two-year Cornell-ESSEC hospitality management program behind him, he was lured to Four Seasons’ Inn on the Park in Houston by Wolf Hengst.
“That was over 30 years ago and I have never worked for anyone else. I met my wife in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and we are still traveling widely, whenever I can get away from all the action here in this beautiful city.”