The World's Most Expensive Hotel Rooms(Christina Valhouli)

What will $25,000 get you these days? A modest down payment on a home? A year of college tuition? How about a single night in the world's most expensive hotel room--the Bridge Suite at the Atlantis resort in the Bahamas? Based on a typical 21-hour stay (2 P.M. check-in and 11 A.M. check-out), that would break down to $1,190 an hour for the privilege.

Who would be willing to spend that kind of money on a hotel room? While all of the 497 individuals on Forbes' 2002 list of the World's Richest People would consider $25,000 pocket change, it's a good bet that they didn't get to be billionaires being frivolous. To paraphrase the old saying: $25,000 here, $25,000 there, and soon you're talking real money.

According to the hotels on our list, the majority of the clients who book their top rooms are wealthy families in the middle of remodeling their homes, film companies and corporations. Of course, there are always stories of the random sheik, deposed dictator or pop star who stays in a $10,000 hotel room--for a month or two--but they are the exceptions.

In fact, as with all hotels, there is plenty of bargaining room (no pun intended). The family looking to spend a month or so will usually be able to negotiate a lower price, and companies can save by using a corporate rate. The numbers of people who actually pay full freight are rare. Billionaires also didn't get where they are by being suckers.

So what exactly do you get when you're spending between $5,000 and $25,000 for a hotel room, which is the range of our list? Space is the most obvious. All of the rooms on the list are huge, averaging more than 5,000 square feet, and that is not counting terraces and balconies--and the occasional private cinema. The other amenity is service. Most of these hotel rooms come with a personal butler or a chauffeured Rolls-Royce at your disposal. Those that do not have a butler or assistant on hand have an implied "anything you want" rule.

When looking at the list as a whole, the hotels in the $5,000-$6,000 range (in Hong Kong, London and Las Vegas) seem like a relative bargain compared with the priciest (New York, Cannes and Rome). Of course, if you want to rationalize the expenditure you could say that the rooms topping the list are a good value: The Martinez Hotel in Cannes comes out to 44 cents a square foot, while the Ciragan Palace Hotel Kempinski is 66 cents a square foot. Anyone, even a billionaire, can afford that.