HANOI, Vietnam — Just four years after the Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi debuted the first spa in its 108-year history, Le Spa du Metropole has won recognition from one of the world’s top travel magazines as one of the five best hotel spas in the world.
In a July 2 announcement, Travel + Leisure ranked Le Spa du Metropole as the No. 5 spa on its top ten list of the World’s Best Spas with a 97.5 rating. Meanwhile, the hotel itself continued its winning ways in the World’s Best Awards, racking up a No. 52 spot on a list of the World’sTop 100 Hotels and No. 5 on a list of Asia’sTop City Hotels.
The only hotels with a better standing on the city list carried the name Mandarin-Oriental or Peninsula.
“It’s fantastic,” said Kai Speth, the Metropole’s general manager. “Magnifique. Really, all of the great adjectives apply here. On the day this news was announced, all of us here at the Metropole could barely get our heads out of the clouds!”
The Metropole has been a mainstay on the Travel + Leisure list since its first appearance in the World’s Best Awards in 2007, though 2013 marks its debut in the Top 100. Every year since 2009, the hotel has won placement on the T+L 500.
Now in its 18th year, the 2013 World’s Best Awards are a compendium of the finest “hotels, destinations and companies that define the very best in travel.” The awards are based on surveys of the magazine’s readers.
Recognition on Travel + Leisure’s awards lists (World’s Best, T+L 500), and Condé Nast Traveler’s awards lists (Readers’ Choice, Gold List) are considered by many hotel and resort professionals to be the most prestigious and coveted accolades in the industry. In Oct. 2012, Condé Nast Traveler hailed the Metropole as one of the top three hotels in Southeast Asia.
Last year, the Metrople was ranked No. 8 on T+L’s list of Asia’s Top City Hotels. Its overall ranking at 93.33 this year is the top T+L ranking by any Sofitel worldwide. The hotel’s singular standing was recognized by Sofitel itself in 2009 when the French hotel group trumpeted the hotel as its first Legend property.
Sofitel has added to its Legend class since then with The Grand Amsterdam, The Old Cataract Aswan and The Santa Clara Cartagena. Since the Metropole’s designation as a Legend, the hotel has continued to enhance its standing as a world class property, excavating a wartime air raid shelter in its garden and repurposing the space as a memorial and the anchor attraction on a new in-house Path of History tour. The hotel also rebuilt its famed Bamboo Bar from the ground-up, and redeveloped space in its interior courtyard as a garden, Le Balcon.
“Once the ‘revolution’ of a renovation is complete, as ours was in 2009, you cannot stop thinking about improvement and enhancement,” said Speth. “We’re continually thinking in an evolutionary manner, scouring every possibility for opportunities to achieve even more.”
