There are hotels that preserve history, and then there are hotels that seem to breathe it.
In Cambodia, Raffles is leaning hard into that distinction. This week, Raffles Grand Hotel d’Angkor in Siem Reap unveiled a new permanent experience called the “Grand Path of History,” an in-house tour that invites guests to step into the early decades of modern travel — a time when steamships carried passengers east, aircraft were still novelties, and the idea of reaching Angkor felt less like a vacation than an expedition. The new exhibition pairs rare photographs, video footage, architectural drawings and other archival artefacts with a newly released book, A Tale of Two Hotels – Raffles in Cambodia, by hotel historians Andreas and Carola Augustin.
That combination — immersive exhibition upstairs, history in hardcover downstairs — feels especially fitting for a country where hospitality and heritage often sit side by side. Cambodia’s past is never far from view. In Siem Reap, it rises from the jungle in stone towers and temple walls. In Phnom Penh, it lingers in boulevards, facades and old hotel corridors. What Raffles is doing now is trying to connect those threads into a more deliberate story: not just the history of two famous hotels, but the history of how Cambodia entered the imagination of the traveling world.
The Augustins’ 160-page book moves between Raffles Grand Hotel d’Angkor and Raffles Hotel Le Royal in Phnom Penh, using both properties as portals into a larger era — the boom years between 1900 and 1940, when long-haul travel was still glamorous, difficult and charged with discovery. It also widens the frame beyond hotel lore, touching on Cambodia’s efforts to project its cultural identity abroad, from the Royal Ballet of Cambodia’s Paris debut in the early 20th century to the sort of glamorous international attention that later brought figures like Charlie Chaplin through the country.
The new “Grand Path of History” tour at Raffles Grand Hotel d’Angkor will be available only to in-house guests and led by a Raffles historian. The exhibition itself was curated by Andreas and Carola Augustin, whose work has long focused on grand hotels as stages for larger cultural and political shifts.
For Joseph Colina, general manager of Raffles Grand Hotel d’Angkor, the goal is not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. “We are delighted and honoured to showcase a seminal early period of international travel, when visitors from around the world first discovered the wonders of Cambodia,” he said. “Our new ‘Grand Path of History’ tour chronicles this story alongside that of Raffles Grand Hotel d’Angkor, whose illustrious 96-year past intertwines with those pioneering arrivals.”
That sense of intertwining is what gives the project its appeal. Grand Hotel d’Angkor was never just another luxury address. Opened in 1932, it was created for the kind of globetrotters who came to Cambodia to see Angkor Wat when such journeys still carried the aura of conquest and curiosity. Raffles still describes it as the first grand luxury hotel of its kind in Siem Reap, and its story remains inseparable from the rise of Angkor as a destination in the global imagination.
Its sister property in the capital carries a different but equally resonant history. Raffles Hotel Le Royal opened in 1929 and remains one of Phnom Penh’s landmark addresses, a hotel whose identity is still rooted in French colonial, Khmer and Art Deco influences. Raffles says the property today has 175 rooms and suites, and that many of them were refreshed during a major restoration completed in 2019.
Dagmar Lyons, general manager of Raffles Hotel Le Royal, sees the new book as something larger than a commemorative object. “Andreas Augustin’s new book, A Tale of Two Hotels – Raffles in Cambodia, illuminates not only a remarkable chapter in history but also its enduring connection to two of the world’s most iconic hotels,” she said. “Our properties in Cambodia – Raffles Hotel Le Royal and Raffles Grand Hotel d’Angkor – are historic gems, each with its own extraordinary story.”
That claim may sound grand, but the two hotels do continue to hold unusual weight in the region’s hospitality landscape. Both were among the Cambodian properties recognized with MICHELIN Keys in the guide’s first Cambodia edition in 2025, and Raffles Hotel Le Royal was ranked No. 2 among Southeast Asia’s best hotels in the 2025 Condé Nast Traveller Readers’ Choice Awards.
Awards, of course, are the easy part of a story like this. More interesting is what they signal. Around Asia, many high-end hotels are racing to become more experiential, more local, more rooted in place. What Raffles Cambodia seems to understand is that in a market crowded with newness, history can be one of the most powerful luxuries of all — not as a dusty backdrop, but as something curated, interpreted and made intimate.
That is especially true in Cambodia, where the romance of old travel can never be fully separated from the reality of national memory, cultural resilience and reinvention. The most compelling part of this new initiative is that it does not treat the hotels merely as glamorous relics. Instead, it presents them as witnesses: to empire, tourism, performance, archaeology, diplomacy and the long process by which Cambodia introduced itself to the modern world.
There is also something clever in the timing. Last year, the two properties launched a seven-day stay package called “A Tale of Two Cities,” linking Phnom Penh and Siem Reap in one seamless itinerary. On paper, it is a luxury travel offering. In practice, it now feels like an extension of the same idea behind the book and exhibition: that Cambodia is best understood not in fragments, but in layers — capital and temple city, colonial elegance and Khmer legacy, spectacle and stillness.
For travelers, that may be the real draw here. Not simply sleeping in a famous old hotel, but inhabiting a version of travel that feels slower, deeper and more self-aware. In an era when so much tourism is optimized for speed, the new “Path of History” makes a case for lingering — in hallways, in archives, in stories.
And in Cambodia, few places are better suited to that pause than these two grande dames, still standing, still polished, still quietly reminding guests that the golden age of travel was never just about where you went. It was about how the world opened up when you got there.
