Empire Riverside Hotel
Hamburg, Germany · Hotel
Empire Riverside Hotel in photographs
When to go
The cheapest month we have found is January, at around USD 172 a night - -29% against what this hotel usually asks.
Where to book
- Book on Booking.com - Free cancellation options, guest reviews and a familiar checkout.
- Book direct with the hotel - Usually the best price, and the only route where a loyalty discount applies.
- Hotel website - Photos, facilities and location.
Our notes
Empire Riverside Hotel
The Empire Riverside Hotel is a high-rise design hotel above the river Elbe on the edge of St. Pauli, with the Hamburg harbour directly in front of it. Its rooms occupy the upper floors, from the 4th up to the 20th, and the hotel guarantees a harbour view in several categories: the Upside rooms on floors 12 to 20, the Skyview room on the 20th floor, and the corner Riverview rooms with two large panoramic windows. The range runs from 25 m² Riverside rooms with a shower through 30 m² Deluxe rooms with a bathtub to Junior Suites of 40 to 45 m² on floors 16 to 19, where the bathtub looks out over the harbour.
The hotel has three places to eat and drink. The Skyline Bar 20up on the 20th floor serves cocktails, longdrinks and a large selection of spirits with a view over the city and port. The restaurant waterkant has an open show kitchen and harbour views, and is known for freshly grilled fish and a large wine list. DAVID'S completes the line-up with small and larger delicacies.
The hotel's own packages combine a harbour-view room with breakfast, a harbour cruise, a menu at waterkant or musical tickets. Photographs: the hotel's own website, empire-riverside.de.
The area
Hamburg has called itself a Hanse city for the better part of eight centuries, and the title is not just civic nostalgia. Emperor Frederick I granted the young port a charter in 1189 giving it free trade rights up the Elbe to the North Sea, and in 1241 Hamburg and Lübeck signed the alliance that grew into the Hanseatic League - the network of merchant cities that ran Northern Europe's trade for the next three hundred years. Hamburg became one of the League's three biggest members, its port shipping beer, grain and salt cod as far as Bergen and Novgorod, and the "Free and Hanseatic City" in its official name today (one of Germany's sixteen states, still governed as its own city-state) is the same claim to independence the medieval merchants made. The Speicherstadt, the red-brick warehouse district on the harbour, is the nineteenth-century version of the same trading instinct, and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The other Hamburg story worth knowing before a visit is the Beatles', and it happened a few streets from where these hotels stand. Between August 1960 and December 1962, an unknown five-piece from Liverpool played hundreds of nights on and around the Große Freiheit - the Indra Club first, then the bigger Kaiserkeller next door, then ninety-two straight nights at the Top Ten Club, and finally the Star-Club, by then a genuine local draw. It was in Hamburg that Astrid Kirchherr photographed the band and gave them the moptop haircut, that Stuart Sutcliffe left the group to study art and stay with her, and died here in 1962, and that John Lennon later said the line Hamburg still uses to sell itself: "I might have been born in Liverpool, but I grew up in Hamburg." Those clubs sat, and mostly still sit, in St. Pauli - the district everyone in Hamburg simply calls "the Kiez," a specific and slightly disreputable stretch of nightlife around the Reeperbahn that has been the city's red-light and entertainment quarter since the street's rope- makers gave it its name four centuries ago, and that turns, a few blocks inland, into some of Hamburg's most ordinary, lived-in residential streets.
What it costs through the year
| Cheapest we have seen | USD 166 ≈ €148 |
|---|---|
| What it usually costs | USD 242 ≈ €216 |
| Dearest we have seen | USD 314 ≈ €281 |
| Times we looked | 11 |
| Gap between the two | 61% |
| Last checked | 2026-10-29 |