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Gothia Towers takes pride in being home to Europe’s largest fully integrated hotel, exhibition and conference center. The
recent addition of a new tower has made it one of the most sought-after elite venues for international meetings and has
turned Gothenburg into a world-class conference city.
This means the constant flow of visitors attending trade
fairs, conferences and lavish events has to be managed
efficiently to ensure people get to experience the various
offerings of the venue. KONE has been working closely
with Gothia Towers to make this possible.
A calculated approach
The first step was to modernize the elevators in the first
tower, built in 2000. KONE replaced the elevator cars
and certain parts, and upgraded the control system for
the tower’s seven elevators in 2012.
The second tower, built already in 1983, needed a more
thorough overhaul, in part because the hotel decided
to add six stories. Guests and spa visitors needed to be
able to reach the new glass-bottomed swimming pool,
hovering 19 stories above the cityscape.
The 29-story third tower was completed in late 2014.
The addition of 450 rooms has made Gothia Towers
the biggest hotel in the entire Nordic region. The hotel
lies next to the Swedish Exhibition & Congress Centre,
part of the same consortium, which sports 34 additional
elevators.
Full house
“The most important aspect for us was accessibility,”
says
Mikael Carlen
, Technical Administrator for Gothia
Towers. “We have 1,200 rooms, and all of them are
occupied during the summer. That means all the
elevators need to be up and running.
“Previously we worked with many different
subcontractors for service and maintenance, but a few
years ago we decided to bundle the tasks together and
use one company,” adds Carlen. “Now we only employ
KONE, who assigned a customer representative to work
primarily with us. Knowing that it’s the same person who
has an overview of what has been done from one visit to
another lends a sense of security for us.”
Working in tandem
The thrilling addition of the hotel’s third tower did not
happen in isolation, though. It posed challenges because
the hotel was still welcoming guests who could not be
disturbed or inconvenienced by the work in progress.
“To make sure the elevator work wasn’t noisy, we used
special tools that didn’t make too much noise when
drilling,” explains KONE’s Project Manager
Ronny
Schorling
. “Logistics was another big challenge. We
didn’t have storage in the vicinity, so we had to arrange
a big storage facility outside of the city and drive the
materials to the site every day.”
Since the hotel was also adding rooms simultaneously,
it was imperative to add elevator capacity. The elevators
were already being used to full capacity, so KONE added
two panoramic elevators that now grace the exterior of
the tower.
“All this took place during the construction of the
elevator shaft for the third tower,” says Carlen. “To
achieve better capacity, the tower now has 10 elevators
– five for the guests, two panoramic elevators and three
staff elevators.”
© Gothia Towers