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It owns and operates the Hotel Negresco, a famous luxury hotel on the seafront in Nice, France.
Société Hôtelière et Immobilière de Nice is, in the simplest terms, a company built around one grand building: the Hôtel Negresco, the pink-domed landmark on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. It owns the hotel and runs it, so its business is renting beautiful rooms and suites to tourists and business travelers, feeding them in its restaurants, and hosting events in its salons. The Negresco is not a chain property or a franchise. It is a single, independently owned palace-style hotel, and that single property is essentially the whole company.
The Negresco opened in 1913, built by Henri Negresco, a Romanian-born hotelier who wanted a lavish hotel facing the Mediterranean. The building is a registered historic monument, and its most famous room is the Salon Royal, dominated by a crystal chandelier made for Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. That kind of history is both the asset and the constraint: guests pay premium rates to stay somewhere with real character, but the company is also on the hook for the heavy upkeep a century-old building demands. The business is small and concentrated, which makes it fragile in a specific way. Revenue depends on tourism to the French Riviera and on filling a limited number of very expensive rooms, so a weak travel season or a drop in wealthy visitors hits the whole company at once. It also lacks the diversification of big hotel groups like Accor or Marriott International, which spread risk across hundreds of properties and brands. There is no second hotel to lean on if the Negresco has a slow year.
Ownership has been a long-running story. The hotel was controlled for decades by the Augier family, and in recent years the owning family engaged in a well-publicized feud over the property's future, with talk of a sale and different heirs pushing different plans. For investors, the company is a rare thing on the Paris exchange: a listed pure play on a single luxury hotel, where the share price tracks the fortunes, and the family drama, of one iconic building.
Saved answer · last researched 6 Nov 2026