Dan dives into swankier market with revamped Caesarea hotel

When Baron Edmond de Rothschild built a modest hotel in Caesarea in the 1960s for golf aficionados, he probably didn’t envision a day when guests would be sipping champagne spritzers with blackberry popsicles while playing pool, in, well, the pool itself.

After closing for an 8-month, NIS 80 million renovation, the Dan Caesarea hotel reopened this month as part of the Dan Hotel chain’s major expansion plans.

In the past 18 months, the luxury hotel chain expanded from 13 hotels to 18, including the company’s first international hotel. The sleek Den Bengaluru opened in December 2017 to serve business travelers in the southern Indian city.

The rapid acquisitions and renovations are part of an effort to make the chain, which owns the posh and regal King David Hotel and other blue chip properties, “younger and cooler,” said Daniel Federman, a member of the Federman family who owns the Dan Hotel chain.

“It’s hard to change the direction of a large company, but we have been guided by the phrase ‘the secret to change is not focusing on the old but on building the new,’” he said at a press launch for the renovated Dan Caesarea on Tuesday.

The revamped hotel is chocked full of artistic accents, some of which nod to the location’s history and archaeology, and some of which embrace modernity, like a flattened vintage car next to 2,000-year-old carvings.