Business space
The best conference and meeting venues in Almaty and Beirut
[ BEIRUT ]
Opening season
WHEN THE FOUR SEASONS HOTEL CHAIN AND DUBAI’S Kingdom Hotel Investment Group got together on Beirut’s seafront to construct their latest five-star venture, you could be sure that very little expense would be spared.
Sure enough, when The Four Seasons Beirut opened earlier this year, it quickly gained a reputation for combining old-world luxury with contemporary architecture and modern service standards.
So, what of its business spaces? It offers 11 function rooms, spread across two of the lower floors, ranging from the immense grand ballroom (36.7 metres long and 20.5 metres wide) through to the comparatively bijou executive boardroom – with a mere eight by five metres floor space.
Yet the clincher is undoubtedly the Grand Ballroom Terrace running along the seaward side of the third floor, offering guests a peerless view, out over the neighbouring Solidere marina. The management says the immediate shorefront will be developed into a park soon, so the hotel’s appeal to the business commmunity is only likely to increase as the seasons pass.
Alex Rayner 1418 Professor Wafic Sinno Avenue, Minet El Hosn, Beirut, + 961 (1) 761000, www.fourseasons.com/beirut
[ ALMATY ]
Almaty on the up
THE DOWNTURN HAS HIT KAZAKHSTAN LIKE EVERYWHERE ELSE, but that has not stopped the country’s determination to establish itself as the regional economic powerhouse. There is no better evidence of this than the Rixos Almaty, a $200m five-star hotel which opened at the end of last year.
Set in the central business district, the Rixos boasts the country’s largest ballroom. You can pack in 1,500 for cocktails or 1,100 theatre-style; enough space for even the biggest multinationals. Three further ballrooms hold around 300 apiece and there are five smaller meeting rooms.
Accommodation is plentiful: on top of the 218 rooms and eight suites, there are 36 duplex suites for long-term guests. And you can’t beat the massage rooms, sauna and traditional hammam – this is Kazakhstan after all.
Lee Cheshire Rixos Almaty, Seifullina Avenue, Almaty, +7 (727) 300 33 00, www.rixos.com
