STOCKHOLM´S MOST EXCITING HOTEL AND MEETING POINT

Press release
February 10, 2003

Benny Andersson, Christer Sandahl and Christer Hägglund to open Stockholm’s first boutique hotel

”We have set out to create a hotel with personality, the kind of place we would want to stay in ourselves. Our guests should know that they are in Stockholm when they wake up in the morning at the Rival,” say hotel owners Benny Andersson, Christer Sandahl (Chairman of the Board of MyTravel) and Christer Hägglund (major stockholder of Proffice), seen here from the left. Altogether, this trio has stayed at thousands of hotels, but only ten were truly memorable.

The Rival Hotel is located on Södermalm’s heights and will be a small, modern, individual hotel with unique top-level service. The 99 rooms will of course maintain high technical standards, but the unique interior decorations inspired by the hotel’s Stockholm location will be just as important as plasma TVs and wireless Internet access. The seventh floor with its magnificent view has been reserved for suites. The Rival will be Stockholm’s first boutique hotel, the antithesis of all that huge standardised hotel chains represent.

The hotel premises also include the classic Rival Theatre that is now being renovated and equipped with the very latest in multi-media technology. On weekdays, it will accommodate 700 guests attending a variety of events and meetings. The premises also include five more conference facilities, while generous foyers outside the theatre itself will provide room for exhibits and mingling. At weekends, the premises will be used as a regular cinema and on occasional weekday evenings, the stage may be used for music and other entertainment.

The Rival is however more than just a hotel. The Cocktail bar (with its original art déco interior design), the Bar & Bistro, the Café and the Restaurant are all housed in the same building and will serve both hotel guests and local Stockholm inhabitants and sightseers, providing them with a wider range of amusements and new opportunities to see and be seen. The hotel will be inaugurated on 6 August, although the Rival Bakery and the Café will be opening their doors on 30 April.

*Boutique hotels, or lifestyle hotels, form a niche of their own in the luxury/first-class hotel segment without hotel chain affiliations. These hotels have unique identities and highly modern characters, with an average of 86 rooms per hotel. The rooms combine contemporary design with high-tech solutions and their most striking feature is the unique level of service and the genuinely personal customer/guest relations. Examples of well-known boutique hotels include the Sanderson Hotel, influenced by Philip Starck, and One Aldwych in London. Altogether there are no more than 100 boutique hotels in Europe, while 87 new ones, the equivalent of 7,000 hotel rooms, are currently being planned. This represents an increase of 87 per cent on 2002, according to a study by Price Waterhouse.

For more information, please visit www.rival.se, or call:
Caroline Eriksson, Managing Director of the Rival Hotel, +46 8 545 789 02, +46 70 727 1926.