A Night on Floor 117: The Hotels Where the City Is Underneath the Bed

Ciel Dubai Marina is the tallest hotel in the world according to Guinness World Records: 377.127 metres, 82 floors and 1,004 rooms.

Rosewood Guangzhou holds the Highest Hotel Guest Room record: a room on floor 106, 484.3 metres above the street.

At The Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong, The Ritz-Carlton Suite is on floor 117.

A building's floor count is not the floor you can sleep on. High floors are sometimes given over to pools, bars and restaurants.

Shanghai tells the story in three hotels: Grand Hyatt on floor 85, Park Hyatt on floor 88 and J Hotel on floor 98.

And above them all, with no express lift: Hotel Everest View in Nepal, at roughly 3,962 metres above sea level.

Dubai (opens in a new tab) doesn't exactly need another height record. It has the Burj Khalifa. It has a skyline that sometimes looks like an architecture competition with no finish line.

And yet, in December 2025 it added one more. Ciel Dubai Marina (opens in a new tab) was officially recognised by Guinness World Records as the tallest hotel in the world.

377.127 metres. 82 floors. 1,004 rooms.

That matters, because Ciel isn't just a hotel occupying a few floors inside somebody else's skyscraper. The tower itself is the hotel.

But here is the first trap in this article: 82 floors in a building does not mean you can book a room on floor 82.

Some of the high floors are given over to pools, restaurants and other facilities, so as long as the hotel does not officially publish the floor number of its highest guest room, we will not assign one ourselves.

Before Ciel, it was Gevora Hotel (opens in a new tab) that made Dubai home to the tallest hotel in the world. It has lost the crown. But we found an entirely different reason to go.

On floor 72 is the 5 Bedroom Penthouse Suite. And it is enormous.

Around 10,000 square feet, five bedrooms, en-suite bathrooms and a 360-degree view taking in the Burj Khalifa and the Arabian Gulf.

This is no longer "a room with a view". It is almost a private house above Dubai.

There is a reason Shanghai (opens in a new tab) deserves a chapter of its own. Because here you can almost read the history of the skyscraper through hotels. For several decades new towers went up in Pudong, each generation trying to climb above the last. And inside three of them, hotels opened.

The Grand Hyatt is inside Jin Mao Tower, one of the buildings that defined the new Pudong. The hotel itself occupies floors 54–87.

But what interests us is where the beds are. Its 548 rooms and suites are on floors 58–85.

In other words: the highest guest-room floor is 85. And the hotel hides another wonderful piece of architecture inside it: an atrium rising 33 storeys.

Once this was the future. And then Shanghai built a taller tower.

Not far away is the Shanghai World Financial Center. And inside it, Park Hyatt Shanghai (opens in a new tab).

Its 173 rooms and suites sit between floors 79 and 88.

Suddenly the Grand Hyatt's high room on floor 85 was no longer the end of the story.

And the view changes accordingly. At this height you're no longer looking only at the street. You start to see the structure of Shanghai itself.

But even that wasn't enough for the city. Because then came Shanghai Tower.

Shanghai Tower rises to more than 600 metres. And inside it is the J Hotel. Its guest rooms are on floors 86–98. Which means you can go to sleep on floor 98.

And this is the moment the phrase "City View" almost stops describing what you can see.

From that height the city already looks different. Roads become lines. Cars become dots. The Huangpu River becomes part of a map. And the enormous towers of Pudong are suddenly beneath you.

Through these three hotels Shanghai tells a wonderful story: 85 → 88 → 98. Each generation simply lifted the bed a little higher.

Now we have to stop talking about floor numbers. Because we have arrived at an entirely different record.

Rosewood Guangzhou (opens in a new tab) sits in the upper part of the Guangzhou CTF Finance Centre, a tower rising to 530 metres. And inside it is a room that holds a Guinness World Records title: Highest Hotel Guest Room.

It is on floor 106. But the truly astonishing number isn't 106. It is 484.3 metres above the street.

Guinness measures the distance from street level to the floor of the room, which makes it a far more meaningful figure than the number on the lift.

Almost half a kilometre of air between you and the street. If your aim is to say "I slept in the highest hotel room in the world above ground", this is the name to remember.

Guangzhou (opens in a new tab) is turning out to be one of the world's capitals of the vertical hotel.

At Four Seasons Hotel Guangzhou (opens in a new tab) there are 344 rooms and suites on floors 74–98. The highest guest-room floor: 98.

And what's interesting is that the hotel keeps going up after the rooms run out. The bar is on floor 99 and a restaurant on floor 100.

Which is a perfect example of why we must not take a hotel's top floor and declare it "the highest room". Sometimes the bed stops at 98. The cocktail carries on to 99.

And then comes the number that will probably make most people stop. 117.

At The Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong (opens in a new tab), The Ritz-Carlton Suite is on floor 117. The hotel describes it as the highest hotel suite in the city.

It has a living room, a separate dining room, a marble bathroom and a jacuzzi looking out over Victoria Harbour.

Note: Rosewood Guangzhou holds the official record for room height above ground, even though 106 is a smaller number than 117. There is no contradiction here.

Floor heights vary from tower to tower, and a floor-numbering scheme is not a physical measure of height. So: 117 is a higher floor by number. But 484.3 metres is a greater physical height, and that is what was verified as the record.

In Seoul stands the Lotte World Tower. And inside the tower is SIGNIEL Seoul (opens in a new tab).

This is one of those places where you enter the building, go up and up — and only then actually reach the hotel.

The hotel occupies a high position within the tower, but here we will keep to the same rule we set ourselves throughout this article: we will not declare a guest-room floor number without an official source confirming that a guest room really is there.

And that might sound like a small detail. But in the world of tall hotels it is critical.

A floor can hold a restaurant. A bar. A pool. A spa. A plant floor. Or a bedroom. We are looking for the bed.

Baiyoke Sky is a long-standing name in the world of tall hotels, but it does something I really like: it tells you clearly where you are going to sleep.

The hotel divides its rooms into zones. Standard Zone: floors 22–49. Sky Zone: floors 50–68.

And then comes the Space Zone. Floors 70–74. That is where the Deluxe, Junior and Superior Suites are, along with the Presidential Suites.

Here we found something interesting. Manhattan is full of towers. There are hotels inside skyscrapers. There are rooms with extraordinary views over Central Park.

But if we are building an article about the highest verified guest-room floor, New York is not where we want to start guessing.

Park Hyatt New York inside One57 is an excellent example of a hotel inside one of Manhattan's famous luxury towers. But One57 is a mixed-use building. The fact that the tower itself is tall does not mean the hotel rooms reach its upper floors.

So New York enters this article precisely in order to explain something important: the height of the building is not the height of the hotel. And that is the difference between an article about skyscrapers and an article about the places where you can genuinely sleep in the sky.

If you ask: which is the tallest hotel in the world? Ciel Dubai Marina. 377.127 metres, 82 floors and 1,004 rooms.

If you ask: where is the highest hotel room above ground? Rosewood Guangzhou. Floor 106. 484.3 metres above the street.

And if you ask: in which verified suite can you press a truly outrageous floor number? The Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong. The Ritz-Carlton Suite. Floor 117.

Three hotels. Three different records.

After hundreds of billions of dollars of skyscrapers, express lifts, steel and glass, you might think human beings had won the height game. And then Nepal turns up.

Above Namche Bazaar stands Hotel Everest View. Guinness notes it in the context of a sleeping experience at roughly 3,962 metres above sea level.

Not 377 metres. Not 484. 3,962 metres.

There is no floor 117. There is no skyscraper. There is no need for an express lift. There is a mountain.

And that is of course an entirely different kind of record: height above sea level, not the height of the room above the ground the building stands on. But it makes the perfect ending to this journey. For decades we built towers to lift hotels into the sky. And nature simply started higher.

If the aim is the genuine record for height above the street, I'd go for Rosewood Guangzhou and make sure the booking is for a room category on the highest floor possible.

If the aim is the moment you look at the lift display and see a number you can hardly believe belongs to a hotel: The Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong, floor 117.

If I want the architecture story: Shanghai. And I'd even turn it into a holiday in its own right. A night at the Grand Hyatt. A night at the Park Hyatt. And a night at the J Hotel. 85 → 88 → 98. Three nights that tell three generations of a human race towards the sky.

And if I want to be the first among my friends to say I slept in the hotel that currently holds the title of tallest hotel in the world: Ciel Dubai Marina.

At these hotels there is a question almost nobody asks when booking an ordinary hotel: which floor is the room I'm buying on?

Not "High Floor Requested". Not "Skyline View". Not a nice photograph on the website. A floor number.

Check the floor range of the room category. Check whether High Floor is a guaranteed category or only a request. Check which way the window faces, too.

And above all check the weather. At this height cloud, mist and haze can turn a room you paid for a view of tens of kilometres into a room with a completely white view.

And for anyone with a fear of heights: it might be worth thinking about that before booking floor 117.

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