Hôtel Martinez, in The Unbound Collection by Hyatt

The Hotel

Hôtel Martinez opened in February 1929 at 73 Boulevard de la Croisette under Emmanuel Martinez, a Palermo-born hotelier who built it as the largest art deco palace on the French Riviera and personally hand-painted the original lobby murals. The hotel takes the eastern half of La Croisette in a seven-storey block with a private beach directly across the road, and the architecture (by Charles Palmero) is the textbook reading of late-1920s deco: stepped balconies, brass-edged metalwork, frescoed ceilings in the public rooms, and the original lift cages in operation. The Hyatt Unbound Collection rebrand in 2013 added the corporate spine; a complete renovation across 2021 to 2023 under designer Pierre-Yves Rochon refreshed every room and added the rooftop terrace.

The 411 rooms and suites occupy seven floors with the upper category running the Boulevard side and the sea view; categories include 233 standard rooms, 92 superior, 56 deluxe with private terrace, and the 30 named suites at the top of the house. The signature is the Penthouse 7, the 1,000 square metre seventh-floor suite that the Film Festival's biggest studios book for May (Disney, Warner, Universal rotate the booking) and that runs the most theatrical view of the Mediterranean and the Croisette of any single hotel room in Europe. The standard rooms are sized small by 2026 standards (28 to 32 square metres) but the design is the cleanest art deco read on the Riviera, marble bathrooms, brass detail, blackout curtains, and air conditioning that handles the August humidity.

Food and beverage is led by La Palme d'Or, the three-Michelin restaurant on the second floor under chef Christian Sinicropi, with a tasting menu format and a 26-seat dining room that is the most consistently top-tier restaurant in any French Riviera hotel. La Plage is the private beach restaurant directly across the Croisette with a complete summer programme; ZPlage is the rooftop in summer; Le Sud is the lobby brasserie for all-day; the Bar L'Amiral is the festival-week cocktail bar that has its own Wikipedia entry. The kitchen pace through the second week of May is the most-watched professional set in European hotel hospitality.

The Carita Spa with twelve treatment rooms, the outdoor heated pool, the fitness centre on level six with sea-view glass, and the festival-week event team are the operational signature. Service is the strongest of the three Cannes palace hotels: the senior front office has run the property through two ownership transitions, the staff-to-room ratio runs roughly 1.5 to 1 in season, and the room-by-room call list for festival week is held in the executive offices as a living document of every studio and agent in motion. Outside festival week the hotel runs as the standard Riviera palace, slightly cooler than the Carlton, slightly more international than the Majestic, and the only hotel on the Croisette where the building itself is the destination.

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