Hôtel Métropole Monte-Carlo

The Métropole is what you book when you want Monte-Carlo's grand-hotel standards without the Monte-Carlo pageantry. It sits three minutes above the casino square behind its own gates, on a plot once owned by Pope Leo XIII, and has been a hotel since 1886. It is independently owned rather than part of the Société des Bains de Mer group behind the Hermitage, and a Leading Hotels of the World member. Jacques Garcia reworked the inside in 2004 and is back for the current rebuild, turning the Belle Époque shell into something warmer and more intimate: velvet, dark wood, low light, a lobby that feels like a private club rather than a station concourse.

The hotel closed in December 2024, reopened in May 2025, and is being rebuilt floor by floor. The first 45 Garcia rooms and suites, on the second and third floors, arrived in 2025 in five categories from Deluxe Premium Room up to Deluxe Premium Suite. The second floor is done in soft blues with embroidered Colefax & Fowler fabrics, the third in golds, with marble bars and cast-iron baths. A Deluxe Premium Room is 22 to 27 square metres, a Prestige Room 32 to 44. Entry rooms are genuinely small and some look onto the road or the building next door, so ask for a renovated one and ask what it faces.

Two things come up again and again in guest feedback. The first is service, described as personal and unhurried in a way the bigger houses cannot always manage. The second is the Odyssey pool terrace, designed by Karl Lagerfeld around a heated seawater pool and a glass fresco of the voyage of Ulysses, which gives you a proper pool and restaurant in the sun at the hotel, something the Hermitage cannot offer. Zia at Odyssey cooks Italian out there from April to September. Inside, Les Ambassadeurs by Christophe Cussac holds two Michelin stars, Yoshi serves Japanese under Takeo Yamazaki, and the Spa Métropole by Guerlain opened in July 2025 with ten treatment rooms.

The compromise is location. It is on the Avenue de la Madone rather than on the square, and the sea is a view from certain rooms rather than a walk from the door. Very few have a real sea view at all, because the Métropole sells atmosphere, not panoramas. In high summer the pool terrace fills and loungers are hard to come by, and the rebuild is still working through the building, so an untouched room is a real possibility unless you pin one down. It suits couples, and anyone who finds the casino-square hotels a little corporate.