Vienna’s 25 Most Storied Hotels
An 1863 Ringstrasse palace, two former banks with pools in their vaults, a riding school, and the café-hotel that went to war over a cake.
Vienna kept its palaces, and a surprising number of them now rent rooms. This list has an 1863 Ringstrasse palace, two former banks with swimming pools in their old vaults, a military riding school, a set of suites built into empty shops, and the café-hotel that fought a decades-long court war over a chocolate cake.
The list is grouped by character, not ranked. Each hotel’s name links to its own site, where the rate is current and you book direct.
The grand old ones
Hotel Sacher Wien · Innere Stadt
Eduard Sacher opened the hotel in 1876; his father Franz had invented the Sachertorte. After Eduard died, his widow Anna ran the place for nearly forty years, famous for her cigars and her French bulldogs. A long court fight with the Demel pastry shop over who could sell the Original Sacher-Torte ended in the hotel’s favor in 1963. British officers were billeted here after 1945, in the occupied Vienna that Graham Greene used for The Third Man.
Hotel Imperial · Kärntner Ring
The Imperial went up in 1863 as the Ringstrasse palace of the Duke of Württemberg and became a hotel for the 1873 World’s Fair. For more than a century it has been Austria’s house for visiting heads of state. Wagner lived here with his family for months in 1875 while he rehearsed in Vienna, and the hotel dates its Imperial Torte to the 1873 opening.
Hotel Bristol · Kärntner Ring
The Bristol opened in 1892 on the Ring, right next to the opera house. During the ten-year Allied occupation after the war, it served as the headquarters of the American forces.
Grand Hotel Wien · Kärntner Ring
When it opened on the Ring in 1870, the Grand was Vienna’s first grand hotel. After the war the building turned to offices, and from 1957 it held the first headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency. It became a hotel again in 1994 after a full rebuild.
Hotel Stefanie · Leopoldstadt
An inn has stood on this spot for more than four hundred years, which the Stefanie uses to bill itself as Vienna’s oldest hotel. It took its name in the 19th century from Crown Princess Stéphanie, the wife of Crown Prince Rudolf. It is the flagship of the family-run Schick group.
Hotel Regina · Alsergrund
The Kremslehner family has run the Regina for four generations, facing the Votivkirche. Its history has been published as a volume in the Most Famous Hotels in the World book series.
Hotel König von Ungarn · Innere Stadt
An inn has operated at Schulerstrasse 10 since 1746, and the König von Ungarn calls itself the oldest continuously run hotel in the city. It shares its block with the Figarohaus, where Mozart lived from 1784 to 1787 and wrote The Marriage of Figaro. A glass-roofed bar now fills the house’s old inner courtyard.
Austria Trend Parkhotel Schönbrunn · Hietzing
The Parkhotel was built in 1907 as Emperor Franz Joseph’s guest house, just outside the gates of Schönbrunn. Guests of the imperial court stayed here until the monarchy ended in 1918.
Used to be something else
Rosewood Vienna · Petersplatz
Rosewood opened on Petersplatz in 2022 in a 19th-century former bank headquarters. The building was home to Erste Österreichische Spar-Casse, the oldest savings bank in Austria. It was Rosewood’s fifth hotel in Europe.
The Ritz-Carlton, Vienna · Schubertring
The hotel joins four Ringstrasse palaces from the 1870s into one building. It opened in 2012, after the block was knitted together and converted.
Palais Coburg Residenz · Coburgbastei
The Palais Coburg was built in the 1840s as the Vienna seat of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family, on top of a 16th-century bastion of the old city walls whose casemates survive in the cellars. It reopened as an all-suite hotel in 2003. In July 2015 it was the room where the Iran nuclear deal was finally settled.
Park Hyatt Vienna · Am Hof
The Park Hyatt opened in 2014, the first Hyatt in Austria, in a former bank headquarters from around 1915 on Am Hof, one of the city’s oldest squares. The swimming pool sits down in the bank’s old vault level.
Imperial Riding School, Autograph Collection · Landstrasse
The building went up in the 1850s as an imperial military riding school. After years as a Renaissance hotel it reopened in 2023 as Austria’s first Autograph Collection property. The brick riding hall is now the event hall.
Ruby Marie Hotel Vienna · Neubau
Ruby opened its first Vienna hotel in 2016, in part of a former department store on Mariahilfer Strasse. After IHG bought the Ruby brand in 2025, it trades as Ruby Marie by IHG. Its rooftop bar looks out over Vienna’s main shopping street.
Hotel Daniel Vienna · Landstrasse
A full-size boat hangs off the edge of the roof — Erwin Wurm’s sculpture Misconceivable, up there since 2012. The hotel is in a listed modernist office block from the early 1960s. The Weitzer family from Graz converted it and opened Hotel Daniel in 2011.
DO & CO Hotel Vienna · Stephansplatz
The hotel is inside the Haas Haus, Hans Hollein’s 1990 mirror-glass building that faces St. Stephen’s Cathedral head-on. It is run by DO & CO, the Vienna caterer that feeds airlines and Formula 1 paddocks. The hotel opened in the building in 2006.
The characterful small ones
Hotel Altstadt Vienna · Spittelberg
Otto Ernst Wiesenthal opened the Altstadt in 1991 in a grand 19th-century house in the Spittelberg quarter. His own collection of several hundred artworks, from Warhol to Niki de Saint Phalle, hangs through the rooms. Designers including Matteo Thun each took on rooms and suites.
Hotel Beethoven Wien · Mariahilf
The Beethoven stands across from the Theater an der Wien, where Beethoven lived while he wrote Fidelio, first staged there in 1805. It became the first Townhouse property of the Romantik group. Each floor takes a theme from the cultural history of the neighborhood.
Hotel Motto · Mariahilf
Hotel Motto opened in 2021 in the building of the old Hotel Kummer, which had run on Mariahilfer Strasse since the 1870s. On top is the glass-roofed restaurant Chez Bernard, run by the hotel’s owner.
Hotel Orient · Innere Stadt
The Orient has traded on the Tiefer Graben since 1896, and it is the best known of Vienna’s Stundenhotels — the discreet kind that rents rooms by the hour. The house and its privacy are well enough known in the city to have become the subject of their own photo book.
Different ideas of a hotel
magdas Hotel · Landstrasse
The charity Caritas opened magdas in 2015 as Austria’s first hotel run as a social business. Much of the staff came to Austria as refugees and work alongside hotel professionals. In 2022 it moved into a converted 1960s former priests’ residence.
25hours Hotel Wien beim MuseumsQuartier · Neubau
The 25hours runs on a circus theme, with big-top imagery drawn by an artist through the house. It occupies a converted mid-century student tower beside the MuseumsQuartier. The rooftop bar looks out over the museums and the city.
Grätzlhotel · Karmelitermarkt and other quarters
The Grätzlhotel has no single building: its suites are set into former shops — old butchers’, tailors’, and other empty storefronts — scattered across three Vienna neighborhoods. The Urbanauts group began turning vacant shopfronts into these street lofts in 2011.
Superbude Wien Prater · Leopoldstadt
Superbude opened at the Wurstelprater funfair in 2023, sharing a new building with the Amsterdam brand Zoku. It is the Hamburg company’s first hotel outside Germany, and like its others it mixes hostel and hotel rooms under one roof.
Boutiquehotel Stadthalle · Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus
The Stadthalle bills itself, with the City of Vienna’s smart-city program, as the world’s first city hotel with a zero-energy balance. The passive-house wing that gets it there opened in 2009. A lavender roof and rooftop beehives supply the honey at breakfast.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are these hotels ranked?
No. The groups sort them by character, and the order within each group carries no meaning.
What made a hotel interesting enough for this list?
A story. Every entry was a palace, a bank, a riding school, an imperial guest house, or a hotel built on an unusual idea. Comfort alone did not qualify a hotel.
Why are there no prices?
Rates change daily and a priced list goes stale in a month. Every hotel name links to its own site, where the rate is current and you book direct.
Which hotel puts me closest to the day trips on this site?
Most day trips from Vienna leave by train from the Hauptbahnhof or by Danube boat from the Reichsbrücke. The Ring hotels sit central, a short taxi or U-Bahn ride from either.
Do the small hotels book out faster than the grand ones?
Usually. The small houses — Altstadt, Beethoven, Motto — hold fewer rooms and fill first. Book those before the palaces.