Rio de Janeiro’s first 5-star hotel reopens as luxury residential apartment due to tourism crisis

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Gloria, Rio de Janeiro’s first five-star hotel, which in its heyday was the favorite of Brazilian presidents, will reopen this year transformed into a residential apartment building, the same fate that awaits other establishments that are vacant due to the sharp drop in tourism.

The Rio de Janeiro City Hall has authorized this year that some hotels, deactivated due to the tourism crisis, be converted into residential or commercial buildings, reflecting the seriousness of the situation of the hotel sector in the mecca of Brazilian tourism.

The coronavirus pandemic, which collapsed tourism, was only the final blow that brought down an already shaky sector due to a supply of rooms that significantly exceeds the demand of tourists even in high seasons.

Rio, which had some 30,000 hotel rooms before the 2014 World Cup in Brazil and the Olympic Games it hosted in 2016, encouraged the construction of hotels in the city for events, a requirement of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and came to have a supply of 62,000 rooms available.

“We came to have the most modern network in Latin America because of the Olympic Games, but the expectations of business, tourism, and growing events were not confirmed. And the retraction was further aggravated by the pandemic,” said Alfredo Lopes, president of the Rio de Janeiro Hotel and Lodging Association (HotéisRIO).

According to the entity, at least 80 hotels have suspended activities due to the pandemic, twelve of them definitively, and about twenty are awaiting their conversion.

Currently, the city offers some 52,000 rooms to tourists, but hotel occupancy, while it has recovered in recent months after falling to historical levels due to the pandemic, still does not exceed 45% of its capacity.

“The reconversion of hotels is something essential because we jumped from 30,000 to 60,000 rooms, and already before the pandemic, we knew that we had neither the number of tourists nor the number of events to guarantee subsistence,” said Lopes.

The association leader admitted that the process of reconversion of hotels into buildings with new uses, which requires municipal authorization, had been negotiated with the City Hall since before the pandemic.

“The objective of this reconversion is to give a new use to hotels that are already deactivated or that may close, without generating any jobs and much fewer taxes,” he explained.

The Gloria is the prime example of that crisis. This hotel, a neoclassical mansion by French architect Joseph Gire near downtown Rio and featuring a theater, casino, party rooms, entertainment areas, and 150 rooms, has been closed since 2009.

Rio’s first five-star hotel, the first reinforced concrete building in South America, and a World Heritage Site, will be 100 years old in 2022. In its heyday, when the city was still the capital of Brazil, it was a favorite of politicians, heads of state, and artists.

In 2008 it was acquired by businessman Eike Batista, then the eighth richest man in the world, who wanted to turn it into the country’s first six-star hotel, but after his bankruptcy it was sold to the Mubadala sovereign wealth fund, which later sold it to its current owners.