Each of the hotels that we selected offers the expected creature comforts: well-appointed rooms, skilled staff and business-minded amenities. What sets each hotel apart is its exemplary service and unique luxuries—from a tropical-themed pool and spa to an open-air terrace overlooking the city with a sense of Soviet history permeating the atmosphere.

If you have to conduct business at Moscow’s World Trade Center or the nearby Expocentr, book a room at the Mezhdunarodnaya Hotel, which is part of the massive World Trade Center complex. The hotel houses a library that receives more than 200 business publications monthly, including 60 newspapers. The Atlantis Fitness Club, with its heated swimming pool, waterslides and potted palms, suggests a tropical island. The club also offers free weights, cardiovascular machines and fitness classes.

The World Trade Center complex houses a shopping mall, residential apartments and 12 restaurants, cafés and bars. The hotel is located a short walk from a restaurant row of sorts, where most of the eateries and clubs belong to either Anton Tabakov or Andrei Dellos, two famed restaurateurs. Dellos, the mastermind behind the wildly popular Pushkin Café, also owns Shinok, which brings the diner into the ambiance of a traditional Ukrainian village—complete with farm animals. Kafka is a popular karaoke bar owned by Tabakov, an actor who also owns Oblomov Na Presne.

The Golden Ring Hotel, a prime example of utilitarian Soviet architecture, is located across the street from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, one of the Stalin era’s Seven Sisters buildings. The property’s Mediterranean restaurant, Panorama, offers gorgeous city views from its perch on the 23rd floor. With its location at one end of Moscow’s famous pedestrian walk—the Arbat—guests of the Golden Ring can stroll past a mix of souvenir kiosks, themed restaurants and upscale clothiers and cafés, enjoying the entertainment provided by local street performers.

The Swissotel Krasnye Holmy, which opened last summer, is owned by hotelier Raffles. Each of the 235 rooms in the 34-floor edifice comes with high-speed Internet service. They also feature bathrooms with heated floors. The hotel boasts the largest average room size in the city. The 19th floor houses an open-air terrace and executive club lounge, which offers complimentary breakfast, light snacks and beverages all day for guests in Swiss Business Executive Club rooms and suites. A boardroom adjacent to the lounge seats eight people.

Hotel amenities include a sauna, pool, exercise room, beauty salon and private spa treatment rooms. The top-floor City Space Bar and Lounge boasts stunning views of Moscow, perfect for gazing across the skyline from your southeast vantage point as you sip a vodka martini. 

Hotel Baltschug Kempinski, positioned on the river across from the Kremlin’s church steeples and the colorful onion domes of St. Basil’s, is an 1898 structure designed by architect Alexander Ivanov in the neoclassical style. After several incarnations, including a stint as a dormitory for the official state tourist agency, Intourist, the Baltschug underwent extensive renovations between 1989 and 1992. Today it is owned by German hotelier Kempinski and has a business center open 24 hours daily that rents computers and video cameras.

The hotel’s namesake restaurant offers a Sunday linner, a feast that takes place between lunch and dinner. Guests in the Kremlin or presidential suites can opt for the Butler suite package, with a personal valet and a BMW sedan at their disposal. The hotel’s saunas were built on the same ground that once housed the municipal baths in which Ivan the Terrible’s bodyguards soaked. 

Next door to the Bolshoi Theater and facing the Kremlin is Le Royal Meridien National. The hotel’s facade dates to 1902, when architect Ivanov designed the 221-room hotel in the eclectic style for 1 million rubles. The staff will remind you that Vladimir Lenin occupied room 107 for a week in 1918. 

The three-bedroom, two-bathroom presidential suite offers Hermès cosmetics and sweeping views of the Kremlin and surrounding Alexandrovsky Gardens. The National also houses a professionally equipped workout room, an indoor heated pool and a Jacuzzi. In Western style, the fitness bar offers freshly squeezed juices; a sauna, steam bath and massages are available to guests at a nominal fee.

For those travelers who are accustomed to taking golf with their meetings, Le Royal Meridien is also the proprietor of Le Meridien Moscow Country Club, which boasts the only 18-hole golf course in Moscow. Located 25 miles outside the city center, the country club can handle larger business conferences while offering a variety of seasonal recreational events, such as dog-sled racing, cross-country skiing and snowmobiling.

Down the street from the National is the Metropol Hotel. Named the Second House of Soviets in 1918, where post-revolution leaders met to discuss the country’s fate, many notables have slept in its rooms, including President John F. Kennedy, Joseph Stalin, George Bernard Shaw, Nikolai Bukharin and Sergei Prokofiev. Opened in 1901 by arts patron and businessman Savva Mamontov, the original plans were to incorporate the Art Nouveau hotel as a part of a larger complex comprised of a theater, exhibition halls and restaurants. Grigory Rasputin, the mystic who ingratiated himself to the family of Czar Nicolas II, held his famous drinking sessions in the hotel’s restaurant. The same location was used in the 1965 film Doctor Zhivago. The hotel is centrally located across the street from the Bolshoi Theater. The Kremlin, Red Square and the Okhotny Ryad underground shopping center are a short stroll away.

Moskva-City, a large business center, is under construction along the Krasnopresnenskaya embankment. Some phases are complete; the entire complex is expected to be done in 2010. It will have 2.5 million square meters of space, covering 247 acres. The centerpiece, Federation Tower, will consist of two buildings, the larger of which will be Europe’s tallest building and will house a Hyatt Hotel. Although the structure’s plan has come under fire from local officials who object to its height and contemporary design, the builder has defended his plans, saying the tapering central spire is reminiscent of Stalin’s grand Seven Sisters buildings, which include Moscow State University and the Ukrainia Hotel.

To view the Best Hotel chart click:
 List of Best Hotels in Moscow

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Recreation & Cultural Attractions


Kremlin
Treasures within the fortress wall’s museum include the state jewels, priceless Fabergé eggs and other artifacts of czarist Russia.
www.kreml.ru
tretyakov gallery
This state-owned gallery is the national treasury of Russian art, with more than 130,000 works by Russian artists.
10 Lavrushinsky Pereulok
www.tretyakovgallery.ru/english

GUM Department Store
This historic department store is more like a mall, with high-end shops set in a magnificent 19th-century structure.
3 Red Square

St. Basil’s Cathedral
Its colorful domes marking the south end of Red Square, this landmark, commissioned by Ivan the Terrible, is a familiar sight.
Red Square (south end)

Lenin Mausoleum
With rumors circulating that this exhibit may be nearing its own end, see the carefully preserved Bolshevik leader lying in a near-perpetual state, along with a panoply of Soviet and revolutionary leaders of the past interred behind the mausoleum.

Red Square
www.lenin.ru
pushkin museum
of fine arts
A worthy way to spend a day, some of the most famous works by Degas, Renoir and Picasso are on exhibit in Pushkin’s Museum of Private Collections.
12 and 14 Volkhonka Ulitsa
www.museum.ru/gmii

Novodevichy Cemetery
and convent
Among the notables buried here are literary heavyweights Gogol and Chekov, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and composer Shostakovich.
1 Novodevichy Proezd

Gorky Park
With its sidewalks flooded in winter for ice skating and perfect in summer for an evening stroll, this park attracts locals and visitors alike for an escape from the hectic Moscow streets.

Okhotny Ryad    
This underground cavern of upscale Russian and foreign merchants is where new Russians do their shopping. A food court is located on the bottom floor.

1 Manezhnaya Square
www.or-tk.ru/eng

Bolshoi Theater
Closed for three years for much needed renovations, catch a glimpse of the 19th-century facade as you relax by the fountain in the square in front of the building.
1 Teatralnaya Ploshchad

Moscow State University
This monumental structure is one of seven of Stalin’s behemoth creations meant to celebrate the strength of the Soviet Union after World War II.
Universitetskaya Pereulok
www.msu.ru/en
   —EC