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.