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Berlingieri felt that the Oriental had begun to rest on its laurels and had dropped behind its competitors. He wanted to develop the Oriental into one of the best hotels in the world. Too involved with his various businesses to devote time to the project, Berlingieri in November 1967 appointed 30-year-old Kurt Wachtveitl (1937- ), at that time manager of Nipa Lodge (a hotel that Italthai owned in Pattaya), as general manager of the Oriental.
In September 2008, the hotel formally changed its name from The Oriental, Bangkok to Mandarin Oriental, Bangkok. The two-story Authors’ Wing, the only remaining structure of the original 19th-century hotel, houses suites named after Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, Noël Coward and James Michener. The hotel has contained 331 rooms, including 60 unique suites. Augustin, Andreas; Williamson, Andreas (2000). The Oriental Bangkok. Augustin, Andreas. “Wachtveitl – Why don’t you do some work?”. The River Wing contains deluxe two-bedroom suites named after former guests or personages associated with the hotel, including Barbara Cartland, Gore Vidal, Graham Greene, Wilbur Smith, John le Carré, Jim Thompson, Norman Mailer, Thai author Kukrit Pramoj. Vienna: Leading Hotels of the World. Other suites are named after ships associated with the early Bangkok trade, such as Otago (once captained by Joseph Conrad), HMS Melita, Vesatri and Natuna.
At the end of the war, a six-person partnership each contributed US$250 to buy the hotel, badly run down from its wartime service. The partnership consisted of Germaine Krull (1897-1985), Prince Bhanu, General Chai Prateepasen, Pote Sarasin (prominent businessman and lawyer) and John Webster and Jim Thompson, two Americans who had served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and who had stayed on in Thailand. Born in Germany, she had been best known as a photographer during the 1920s before service in the Pacific as a war correspondent for Agence France Presse. Krull took the position of manager in 1947, despite no prior experience in the hotel field.
In 1972 the hotel acquired an adjacent property upon which it erected the 350-room River Wing. In 1974, Mandarin International Hotels Limited was formed as a hotel management company. The Group’s intention was to expand into Asia and operate hotels with a standard of service comparable to their property in Hong Kong. The Group began with the opening of its flagship property, The Mandarin, in Hong Kong in 1963, which soon built up a reputation for luxurious service.
Mandarin Oriental, Bangkok is a five-star hotel in Bangkok owned in part and managed by Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group. Located on the Chao Phraya River, the original structure was the first hotel built in Thailand when it opened as The Oriental in 1876. Today, the hotel is one of two flagship properties of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group. When Siam opened to foreign trade after the signing of the Bowring Treaty, the sailors that manned the ships though Bangkok required accommodation on shore.
