Johannesburg – The upgrade of Sun City’s first hotel, which celebrates 45 years, began on Monday.
Between August 2024 and November 2026, the Sun City hotel will undergo a complete upgrade of all 340 rooms, bedroom corridors, bedroom terraces, and the Sun Terrace along with various infrastructure upgrades.
The project will be carried out in phases to bring the first 56 refreshed rooms back in operation by end of November 2024, in time for the Nedbank Golf Challenge.
Please see below details that may be of interest, with before and after photographs, which are available via this link.
Construction on the Sun City resort began in July 1978 and the fast-tracked project was completed for R30 million in a record-setting 16 months.
When the resort opened on 19 December 1979, it consisted of one hotel only – the Sun City Hotel.
After just one year, Sun City had already attracted more than 300,000 visitors to the Extravaganza and theatre shows alone, so it was soon apparent that the original hotel could not cope with the unprecedented demand.
The Cascades, The Cabanas, and The Palace added to the inventory but the original Sun City ‘casino’ hotel always gripped the public imagination, and today it is as popular as it was back in 1979.
When the hotel was upgraded in 2016 as part of a R1 billion upgrade at the resort the hotel was relaunched as “Soho”, but renaming one of the most iconic hotels in South Africa requires buy-in from the public.
Brett Hoppe, Sun City General Manager said: “It seemed an appropriate time to give the hotel its own identity but this never resonated with customers and they continued to refer to the “Sun City hotel”.
“While we expected some resistance to the change we were surprised by how resolutely people would cling to the original name.
“When we realised how affectionately the Sun City hotel is embraced by South Africans, we restored the hotel’s original name.”
