WHILE most people know McDonald’s for their fast food menu, most might not realise it once even opened a hotel.
Called the Golden Arch Hotel, the hotel was opened by the brand in Zurich in 2001.
McDonald’s once had a hotel called Golden Arch Hotel[/caption]
Rooms had M-shaped headboards[/caption]
The 211-bed hotel – calling itself four-star – cost around £12million to build at the time.
It was near Zurich Airport, and was designed as a business hotel more than a family hotel.
From the outside, it was hard to tell it was a McDonald’s hotel.
The Times wrote: “What you get is a stunningly beautiful, sleek modernist, four-storey construction clad in steel-grey reflective glass.
“The facade has a graceful, curved sweep, making it look more like a sleek research facility than Ronald McDonald’s crash pad.”
Even in the rooms, they were made up of muted colours and wood throughout.
The only nod to the food chain were e rooms were the M-shaped headboard beds, albeit in a more mellow yellow, which even reclined up and down on a motor.
A report at the time said guests could “book their rooms over the Internet and check themselves in on arrival,” – something rather revolutionary for 2001.
Rooms cost around £75 a night, cheaper than other hotels in the are at the time.
And of course, it had a McDonald’s restaurant downstairs as well as what was called the Aroma Cafes serving coffee (which were later sold and rebranded by Cafe Nero).
Designed by head of McDonald’s Switzerland, Urs Hammer, they had hoped to roll out the concept across the rest of Switzerland.
A second plan was to open one in the town of Lully, followed by one at Geneva Airport.
However, the hotel sadly closed in 2003 and has since been turned into a Radisson Hotel.
A number of reasons were behind it’s closure, not just because of the 9/11 attacks which took place later that year.
It had a McDonald’s restaurant on-site too[/caption]
Families also cited the bathrooms as being uncomfortable, with glass cubicle showers.
Not only that, but the phrase Golden Arches is not as well-known in German speaking countries due to translation issues.
Yet this isn’t the only unusual hotel to open in the world.
A seaside hotel in Hong Kong is a life-sized version of Noah’s Ark.
And in Amsterdam there is a hotel room with an entire plane cockpit.
Here are some other unusual looking hotels including Flintstones-like caves to a Barbie Dreamhouse.
Sadly the hotel closed just a few years after opening[/caption]