| Hotel Name: | Grand Nile Tower Hotel |
| Location: | Cairo, Egypt |
| Architect: | William B. Tabler Architects[1] |
| Owner: | Orascom Investment Holding |
| Number Of Rooms: | 715 |
| Floors: | 41 |
| Website: | http://www.grandniletower.com/ |
The Grand Nile Tower Hotel is located on Roda Island in Cairo, Egypt.
The 966-room original wing of the hotel opened in 1974 as Le Meridien Cairo.[2] In 2001, the $380 million, 715-room, 41-floor Nile Tower wing, with a revolving restaurant and a shopping mall, was added,[2] and the hotel was relaunched in August 2001[3] as Le Royal Méridien Cairo & Nile Tower.[4] The hotel's owners, the Saudi Egyptian Touristic Development Company (SETDC),[5] severed Le Méridien's management contract on 8 August 2002,[6] closed the 1974 wing, and operated the newer wing of the hotel independently as the Royal Nile Tower for a year, until Hyatt International assumed management of the property on 1 August 2003,[7] and the tower wing was renamed Grand Hyatt Cairo. Plans were announced to convert the closed 1974 wing into the 245-room Park Hyatt Cairo, following a $20 million renovation,[8] but the project never came to fruition and the building remains closed as of 2022. All foreign national Hyatt management and staff were evacuated in February 2011, as a result of the Egyptian revolution of 2011. Following this course of action, the hotel's remaining Egyptian staff began to strike, which led Hyatt to sever all ties to the property on March 20, 2011.[9] SETDC was locked in legal disputes with Hyatt for four months, and the hotel continued to use the Hyatt name until 1 June 2011, when the owners officially changed the name to Grand Nile Tower.[5] It was announced in 2017 that the hotel would be renamed the "Hilton Nile Tower" in 2018,[10] but the name change never took place.
Funding for the Grand Nile Hotel's came from Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian President at the time. The Central Intelligence Agency attempted to bribe Nassar with a 3 million dollar cash payment in exchange for his cooperation.[11] Nassar accepted the money, but refused to be bribed and so used it to fund the hotel's initial construction.