Surabaya's Majapahit hotel the best thing in town

Surabaya's Majapahit hotel the best thing in town

Peter Janssen
Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Surabaya

Surabaya, the country's second largest metropolis, is a classic
example of modern Asian urban ugliness.

With its estimated 3.5 million people, Surabaya offers
visitors horrendous traffic, plenty of concrete office buildings,
a plethora of shopping malls and a collection of the
international chain hotels that can be found in just about any
other bustling Asian city.

Unique to Surabaya, however, is the Mandarin Oriental
Majapahit Hotel, arguably the classiest "historic" hotel
remaining in Indonesia.

The Majapahit was built in 1910 by Lucas Martin Sarkies, son
of Martin Sarkies, eldest of the famed Sarkies brothers who
launched some of Southeast Asia's finest hotels.

The Sarkies, including brothers Martin, Tigran and Aviet, were
Armenian merchants who in the 1880s started building classy
hotels in the main entrepots of England's former colonies in
Southeast Asia.

Their first establishment was the Eastern & Oriental Hotel in
Penang, built in 1884, followed by the Raffles in Singapore,
1887, and finally by the Strand in Rangoon, now Yangon, in 1901.

Those three Sarkies' "gems" still stand today, embodying the
good old days of colonial splendor in their respective cities.

All three have undergone extensive renovations, under new
owners, (the Sarkies went bust in the late 1930s), to position
themselves as five-star establishments catering to tourists and
businesspeople with a taste for the past at today's prices.

Less well known within the Sarkies' historic hotel chain is
Surabaya's elegant Majapahit Hotel, a veritable oasis of quiet
and greenery in what has always been a busy, noisy port city.

Lucas Martin Sarkies originally called the establishment the
"Oranje Hotel", sensibly catering to its chiefly Dutch clientele.

In 1936, an Art Deco style lobby was added to the hotel in an
apparent effort to modernize the property, which accounts for its
rather drab frontage today. Luckily the rest of the hotel was
spared.

The Majapahit was extensively renovated in 1996 after being
bought in 1993 by the Sekar Group of Indonesia and the Mandarin
Oriental group of Hong Kong.

Hong Kong-based Mandarin Oriental, which owns the posh
Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong and superlative The Oriental
in Bangkok, now holds 25 percent of the Majapahit plus the
management contract.

The interior of the Majapahit was completely renovated between
1994 to 1996 at a cost of US$35 million, but the building itself
was left untouched as it is a protected historic site.

Luckily for preservationists, the hotel represents more than a
nostalgic throwback to Dutch colonial times.

The Majapahit hotel secured itself a mention in Indonesian
history on Sept. 19, 1945, when a group of Dutch expats raised
their flag on the hotel's main flagpole to symbolize the retaking
of Indonesia as a colony after World War II.

The gesture outraged the Surabaya citizenry, who stormed the
hotel, tore the blue fabric from the Dutch flag to make the
Indonesian red-and-white flag of independence.

Historians claim this incident, and further resistance by the
people in November 1945 as British and Dutch forces returned to
the city, sparked the Indonesian independence movement, earning
Surabaya the nickname of the "City of Heroes".

While many historic Dutch buildings in post-1945 Indonesia
have been torn down to make way for the new, the Majapahit has
been preserved thanks to its revolutionary past.

However, in its post-renovation incarnation, prices have not
been set to attract the hoi polloi.

"We are the most expensive hotel in Surabaya, but we're also
the best value hotel in the Mandarin Oriental chain," said Gerd
Knaust, general manager of the Mandarin Oriental Majapahit Hotel.

The Mandarin Oriental, owned by the Jardines trading
conglomerate of Hong Kong, currently boasts 11 hotels in Asia,
three in Europe and nine in the Americas.

Prices at the Majapahit start at Rp 550,000 ($65) for the
"standard" rooms, of which the hotel has only four.

The remaining 146 rooms are suites, including the two-story,
800-square-meter Presidential Suite, which claims to be the
biggest of its kind in Asia.

President Megawati Soekarnoputri and her predecessor
Abdurrahman Wahid have been recent guests, but not too many other
country or company presidents are visiting Surabaya nowadays.

"Unfortunately, the big investment is missing in Indonesia at
the moment, so why should a CEO from a multimillion dollar
company come to Surabaya when there are no multimillion dollar
investments," noted Knaust.

To keep the hotel occupancy rate at its current 45 percent
average, the Majapahit has been catering more to the Indonesian
market which is less prone to the lure of nostalgia than their
European counterparts.

"I prefer the Shangri-La but one of my friends from Holland
likes to stay at the Majapahit because of the nostalgia thing,"
said Winarto, a Surabaya-based businessman.