One of the Pacific’s most famous hotels finally reopens

After extensive renovation, Samoa’s premier hotel, the Sheraton Samoa Aggie Grey’s Hotel and Bungalows, has fully reopened, debuting its completed revitalisation in time for last month’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.

The King himself paid note to Aggie’s, as it’s known, in his gala speech – after all, there are few South Pacific hotels as storied as Aggie Grey’s, which first opened in the Samoan capital of Apia in 1933.

Movie stars and lionised literary giants occupied its fales at various times, but it was the hospitality of its owner, Samoan-born Agnes, aka Aggie, that made the hotel famous in its own right.

It made Aggie famous, too. It’s said that a friend of hers, American writer James A. Michener, based the character Bloody Mary on her in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Tales of the South Pacific – thus spawning the eponymous character in the musical South Pacific.

The story of the hotel, though, also includes hardship. Cyclone Evan struck Samoa in late 2012, severely affecting the country; the flooding Vaisigano River damaged the property so badly it was shut for three years, reopening in May 2016 as the newly named and internationally managed Sheraton Samoa Aggie Grey’s Hotel and Bungalows.

A seawall was constructed, and in 2014, a casino opened next door, controversially out of bounds to Samoan passport holders.

Then, in 2018, the hotel was again inundated and damaged, this time by Cyclone Gita, which caused widespread destruction on the island nation.