Hoteliers: Airways & Railways

Orient Express (now Belmond). Fairmont. InterContinental. Le Méridien. Swissotel. Okura Nikko. All major players in the modern hospitality sector, and all are distinctive, globe-spanning hotel chains with its own identity and slew of loyal guests. Yet they all have the same, intriguing origin story: before becoming global brands they were airline and railway offshoots, doubling as essential accommodation for staff as well as travellers.

Westin, for example, was a sister company to what’s now United Airlines. Radisson Blu was linked with SAS Airlines, Swissotel was born out of Swissair, Orient-Express was a luxury train linking several major cities in Europe. As for Le Méridien, InterContinental, and Okura Nikko, it was owned and / or operated by Air France, Pan Am, and Japan Airlines, respectively.

Pan Am and InterContinental
In the history of American commercial aviation, there was no airline more influential, important, and better known than Pan American World Airways. It was not the first American passenger airline, nor did it ever meet with much success in the domestic market, but Pan Am (as it was more commonly known), represented a new adventurous image of the United States to the world. When filmmaker Stanley Kubrick produced his landmark vision of the future in the 1968 movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” he envisioned Pan Am as the space carrier that would take men and women regularly into space.