Chronicle No. 59 · People
Georges Nagelmackers Put a Hotel on Wheels
A Belgian banker's son went to America, slept on a Pullman car, and came home determined to make travel itself hospitable.
Georges Nagelmackers was born in Liege on 25 June 1845, into a Belgian banking family. In his twenties he spent around ten months in the United States, where he travelled on Pullman sleeping cars and concluded that Europe wanted the same thing.
He reportedly proposed a collaboration to George Pullman and was turned down - though some accounts question whether the two ever met, and sleeping cars already ran in Belgium before his trip. Either way, he went alone.
In 1872 he founded Georges Nagelmackers & Company, which became the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, headquartered in Paris. His model was pragmatic: rather than run his own railways, he attached his sleeping and dining carriages to other companies' trains and crossed borders that no single national operator could.
- The first train composed entirely of CIWL carriages ran in 1882
- The Orient Express launched on 4 October 1883
- He founded the Compagnie Internationale des Grands Hotels to build hotels along his routes, so the standard did not end when the train did
That last decision is the one worth noticing. Nagelmackers understood that a passenger who has slept in linen sheets and dined off porcelain at seventy kilometres an hour will not accept a bad bed at the terminus. He treated the whole journey as one continuous service.
He was also, improbably, an accomplished coachman: in June 1900 he won the four-in-hand mail coach event at the Paris International Horse Show, later classified as part of the 1900 Olympic Games. He died at Villepreux, France, on 10 August 1905.
Every airline lounge, airport hotel and branded transfer service is working from his sketch: the guest experience begins the moment they leave home.
Lesson: Hospitality does not stop at the front door - the journey to you is part of the experience you are selling.
