Marriott Mena House Cairo | 5-Star Hotel
In 1869, Khedive Ismail built the Mina House Hotel in front of the Giza Pyramids. The reason behind this was his desire to have his own rest house where he spent his time after returning from long hunting trips and meeting his guests, and this rest house overlooks the pyramids plateau and is surrounded by jasmine gardens, then Khedive Ismail expanded the rest house and prepared the pyramid street leading to it and turned the building into a palace for guests of the opening ceremony of the Suez Canal.
Over time nefarious elements in Ismail’s reign advanced, and debts piled up, forcing Khedive Tawfiq to sell the palace to a British man and his wife, Frederick and Jessie Head, who turned it into their private residence for their honeymoon and later on, they expanded the structure and named it after King Mina, the Egyptian monarch known for unifying Egypt and Nubia.
In 1885, they sold the palace to an Englishman and his wife, Ethel and Hughes Locke King, a family known for their love of ancient Egyptian antiquities, and decided to convert the palace into the Mina House Hotel, which opened to the public in 1886. During the First World War, the hotel became a headquarters for Australian and New Zealand troops and then turned into a hospital at the end of that war, and during the Second World War in 1943.
The ownership of the hotel was then transferred from the Luquet family to the Egyptian Hotels Company, which owned historic hotels such as Shepherd and Al Jazeera Palace, and with the revolution of 23 July 1952, the hotel was nationalised and its ownership was returned to the Egyptian government. The present proprietors of the Mena House Oberoi Hotel, Rai Bahadur Mohan Singh and his firm, purchased the hotel in 1971. Oberoi Hotels International, an Indian corporation, took over administration of the property in 1972 and undertook many renovations.
The hotel had 80 unique rooms and suites when it first opened, and another 30 were added in 1920. The Oberoi Group bought the hotel in 1964, and they started refurbishing it in 1972 and completed it in 1975. In 1978, construction on the garden wing commenced, adding 200 more rooms.
In 2007 and 2008 the hotel was renovated again and the number of hotel rooms reaches 486 rooms and suites (7 junior suites and 4 master suites, each with a spacious private balcony overlooking the pyramids). Eugenie, Empress of the French, was also a cousin of Albert Victor, the sometimes Duke of Clarence, not forgetting Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, King Farouk and Queen Nazli, and a lot more.
Mina House Hotel Al Haram, which is situated right by the Great Pyramids of Giza and is encompassed by 40 acres of greenery, provides a health center, a gym as well as a swimming pool. The rooms are filled with handcrafted wooden furniture. All rooms at the Mina House Hotel are air-conditioned, beautifully decorated, come with chairs and an LCD screen for television.
Every guest room and suite comes with a large en suite fitted with a bathrobe and slippers. Breakfast is served in a dining room overlooking the garden. Mina House Hotel Giza Pyramids distances its guests only 700 meters. The concierge will arrange horse and camel riding activities to the pyramids. Hotel ideal for anyone who loves arts, history and archaeological places in Giza, which is 30 kilometers from Cairo Airport.