The Titanic Hotel – what it’s like to sink into bed at the former Belfast HQ of doomed ship’s builders
There’s nothing macabre or spooky about the 119-room property, whose design team have, with great sensitivity, created a nautical and nice hotel on a site associated with one of the world’s worst maritime disasters
Right. Is associating yourself with the world’s most famous maritime disaster a good idea? Belfast people will tell you the ship was fine when she left, captained by an Englishman … Plus the city has discovered a genius for mining tourist gold from, frankly, unpromising material. (There are now Troubles-themed taxi tours and one of its two airports is named after George Best, a footballer known for his carousing ways as much as for his fancy footwork.)
Last December, Titanic Belfast (below), a monument and series of galleries that opened in 2012, was voted the world’s leading tourist attraction at the World Travel Awards 2016.
Great. Is that near the hotel? It’s, literally, on the doorstep. You are unlikely to mistake its purpose: it’s built to resemble a gleaming iceberg.
Spooky. Indeed. It’s impossible to stand in the hotel entrance at night, next to the lit-up slipway down which RMS Titanic slid on the first stage of her one and only journey, without a frisson. Inside the hotel, the little telephone exchange, where the news of her fate in the North Atlantic first came in, has been carefully preserved.