A lot of different people come through the doors and a lot of out-of-the-ordinary things happen in 15 years at a hotel. Such as the strange cases of the berserk businessmen, the Nigerian king, the “monkey woman”, the unbreakable eggs, the frozen fish and the prayer problem.
There’s a party mood in the air at Budapest’s Adina Apartment Hotel this month and the team are reminiscing on such vagaries of life among the guests as they celebrate the hotel’s 15th birthday. Visitors from all continents and most countries have come and gone in that time.
All the 97 apartments have fully equipped kitchenettes with stoves and fridges, a great asset for those visitors who like to bring their own food with them. Icelanders have stayed at the Adina on a number of occasions and they always seem to bring their own frozen fish (but wait until they discover the Hungarian fish soup!).
South Koreans and Indians are other nationalities that apparently like the safety of food from home when they travel. If they don’t bring any, they quickly hunt down Budapest’s speciality shops and stock up in their kitchenette.
Nigeria is a country rich in regional monarchs, and one of its kings came down to the breakfast room every day. Any time he had a visitor, the lowly subject fell to the ground and stayed there until the king gave him a sign to stand up. The first time this happened it shocked everyone else in the room but after a while they got used to it. And of course it made a great photo for the guests, which the king didn’t mind.
The first Moslems at the Adina presented a problem because when they asked which way is Mecca, nobody knew. The unflappable team quickly found out. From Budapest, Mecca is south-south-east, so from the Adina that’s sort of over towards the nearby WestEnd shopping centre.
The female members of the Islamic group presented one of the more unusual sights at the apartments when they accompanied their children to the hotel pool and sat around the patio in their full body covering. No doubt the ladies are used to wearing the jilbab but it is not a mode of dress that easily permits use of the Adina’s 17-metre heated pool, jacuzzi, steam bath, sauna or gymnasium. Sometimes, sacrifices have to be made.
On the subject of traditional clothing, an Indonesian family is well remembered for their appearance at the Adina in full national dress, the father in batik shirt and the mother in a figure-hugging embroidered blouse with a batik sarong and a “selendang” cloth over one shoulder. With the children they presented a blaze of bright colour.
Hotels often don’t reveal names of their famous guests, for privacy reasons. Adina manager Angéla Gergye, who has been in charge for eight years, is happy to talk about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie though. With all those children of theirs, the celebrated couple actually occupied a villa in Budapest while making a film, but their crew of about 20 people was at the Adina for something like three months. On Halloween Pitt and Jolie descended on the hotel incognito with sweets for them all.
People tend not to stay in ordinary hotels for three months. In an apartment hotel, with studio rooms and one- and two-bedroom apartments, average sizes 30-35, 50-70 and 80-90 square metres respectively, it’s different. With those well-provided kitchenettes, plus separate lounge, dining and work areas in the one- and two-bedroomers, an apartment hotel is ideal for longer-term guests, such as businessmen on assignment or people in the middle of relocating.
The Adina’s record holders for the longest residency are an Israeli businessman and his wife who are still there and have chalked up more than five years. This surpasses a family of six from Ireland, who also reached the five-year milestone.
Why would anyone stay so long in a hotel, albeit an apartment hotel? “It’s convenient for them because they get everything they need,” responds Gergye. “They don’t have to worry about cleaning or maintenance and each private apartment has comfortable living spaces and has been designed to suit our guests’ needs, enticing them to make themselves at home.
“We have a more relaxed attitude than hotels, so people are welcome to bring in visitors. When people stay for some time – and 60% of guests here are long-term, more than a month – they get to know the team, and it promotes a family feeling in the hotel.
“For instance we have a 24-hour reception, and late-night people such as the many film crews that pass through come down sometimes just to talk and tell stories.”
One lady in a film crew had an odd habit, putting about 50 pictures of monkeys all over her apartment wall. Gergye had several meetings with her and found out that she had lived in the jungle for a while, adopting one monkey she loved very much. So the pictures made her apartment a home away from home.
One day guests going past a conference room were taken aback at the sight of a bunch of businessmen jigging around and making wild sweeps of their arms exactly as if they were playing imaginary tennis or boxing. In fact it was a corporate team-building event and they were playing Xbox video games. They were using remote controls to respond to events on wall screens that the other guests couldn’t see. The receptionist explained.
At another team-builder, businessmen had to lob eggs from the fourth-floor Canberra conference room onto the ground-level pool patio without them breaking – and somehow they didn’t, a bewildering occurrence that still mystifies Gergye to this day.
Just like in a hotel, the guests can have breakfast downstairs and room service. The studio rooms are hotel room size with a cupboard kitchenette and the more spacious apartments have open kitchens, coffee machine and kettle, minibar, washing machine, iron and ironing board, voicemail, internet access, in-room safe, cable television, radio clock and air-conditioning. Special requests can be considered, such as the humidifier that was bought specially for a guest’s use recently.
There are clusters of two, three or more rooms, with one door to the cluster, so groups can stay together with added convenience.
As well as Budapest there are six other Adina Apartment Hotels in Europe and, perhaps unusually in today’s often male-dominated world, all their managers are women. The ladies are there on merit and not some affirmative action plan gone awry.
“Our operations manager is a man and this gives a good balance,” says Gergye. “We managers have a woman’s eye for detail and he has a man’s eye for maintenance and technical matters. I see things he doesn’t, and vice-versa. From time to time things need to be changed, little things like how to make the beds, re-arrange the furniture and appliances. It is a woman’s touch.”
Many of the Adina’s rooms have balconies that look down into the large central garden. This spring, buds providing splashes of pink, yellow and red have broken out in the greenery. The garden is available for events, as are the four conference rooms.
Other hotel facilities include guest laundry room for the studio apartment users, dry cleaning, car parking, grocery delivery service and babysitting.
Australians have been showing up in greater numbers at the Adinas, pleased to find a familiar name. The brand’s seven European apartment hotels are part of TFE Hotels (Toga Far East Hotels), a leading hotel company based in Sydney, Australia. TFE Hotels operates 70 strategically located hotels across Australia, New Zealand and Europe with hotel rooms and apartments to meet a range of different accommodation needs for leisure and business guests. TFE Hotels’ six brands are Adina Apartment Hotels, Medina Serviced Apartments, Travelodge, Rendezvous, Vibe hotels and Hotel Kurrajong Canberra.
Adina Budapest was their first hotel in Europe, opening in 2000. Apart from the Adina Budapest anniversary, Adina Copenhagen (10 years) and Adina Hamburg (five years) have something to celebrate this year.
With Adina Frankfurt Neue Oper and three Adina Apartment Hotels in Berlin – Adina Berlin Checkpoint Charlie, Adina Berlin Hauptbahnhof and Adina Berlin Hackescher Markt – the brand is well established and inspired by the success on the European apartment hotel market. The European headquarters in Berlin is focused on the development of new Adinas in other German cities: a second one in Frankfurt and new ones in Leipzig and Nuremberg, scheduled to open at the end of 2016.
In Budapest, the reception/lounge provides a welcoming vibe, with cosy sofas, low tables, bookshelves, a gas fire, and tea and coffee. The way Adina describes it, they “combine the flexibility and homely feel of spacious and fully equipped private apartments with the services, amenities and lifestyle facilities of a four-star superior hotel… bringing a touch of Down Under to Europe and reflecting its origin with Australian artworks and pictures, warm colours and contemporary design”.
The bar awaits with comfy chairs and TV as the football season nears its climax and the big games are on. There, the Aussies will no doubt “sink a few tubes” (translation: “drink vast numbers of cans of beer”) in their peculiar vernacular.
Adina Apartment Hotel Budapest
52-54 Hegedűs Gyula utca
District XIII, Budapest
Tel.: (+36-1) 236-8888
Email: abud@adina.hu
www.adina.eu
Email: conference@adina.hu