Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts

Four Seasons Hotels Limited, trading as Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, is a Canadian hotel company. Their headquarters is in Toronto. Most Four Seasons hotels are five-star hotels, meaning they are expensive.

Travel + Leisure magazine and Zagat Survey ranked this grid 98th among the best luxury hotels in the world. Readers of Condé Nast Traveller voted for the Golden Triangle (the company's real estate in northern Thailand) as the world's favourite for three years in a row. The company has been named one of Fortune's "100 Best Employers" every year since the 1998 survey.

History

Founded in 1960 in Canada by Isador Sharp, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, the company opened its first hotel in the red-light district of Toronto. In 1970, the chain's first overseas hotel opened in London. In 1986, the company went public, entering the stock market, but in 2007 it became private again (Sharpe bought shares from the market and resold them to private funds).

The main owners of the company: the founder of the company Isadore Sharp (5%), as well as the companies Cascade Investment and Kingdom Hotels (47.5% each), owned, respectively, by Bill Gates and the nephew of the King of Saudi Arabia, Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal.