Hotels

A former Russian consulate on a Hokkaido hillside is an unlikely setting for a Relais & Châteaux address. Hotel Biaclyn Hakodate has taken a 1908 diplomatic outpost - the only surviving building of its kind in Japan - paired it with a newly built wellness wing, and turned the whole …

Some hotels put you to bed inside a cave and call it a gimmick. Anemoessa Guesthouse, in the hills above the Corinthian Gulf, does something slightly stranger: it treats the cave as the point, then adds a wood fire and a balcony looking out over water and mountains, and lets …

A stretch of southwestern Bulgaria has two castle-shaped hotels rising out of the landscape between two villages, visible from far enough away that drivers on the road to Leshten tend to do a double-take. Neither building is old. Both are heated and filled by water that comes out of the …

Picture a hotel in the Dolomites where the roof has a ski slope, a trampoline park, and a pickleball court, and the swimming pool below empties straight into a natural lake with its own sandy beach. It sounds like something dreamed up for a theme park brochure, but the Falkensteiner …

Pilots flying into Nuremberg Airport use it to find their way home. That's not a marketing flourish - the sloped glass facade of a pyramid-shaped hotel outside Fürth genuinely functions as a landmark on approach, its faceted surface catching the light from miles off. After sitting empty since 2022, the …

Drivers along the Great Ocean Road have been slamming on their brakes for this one for decades. Kids in back seats compete to spot it first, and for a stretch of coastline that already has plenty to look at, one small glass box balanced on a single concrete leg somehow …

You can fly across most of Western Australia and see barely a soul below – just red earth, then blue water, then more red earth. Sal Salis sits right where those two extremes collide: a scattering of safari tents dropped between a national park full of gorges and kangaroos, and …

After a long day scrambling over red rock, the appeal of a place like the Broken Spur Inn & Steakhouse becomes obvious fast. It sits on a hilltop just outside Torrey, Utah, close enough to Capitol Reef National Park that you can be back at the entrance in five minutes, …

A building that once controlled every second of a person's day now holds a quiet you're free to sit in as long as you like. After a century of guarded silence, Nara Prison has reopened, ready to ask you what freedom really means. At HOSHINOYA Nara Prison, that quiet hasn't …

In Chiba Prefecture, a 130-year-old school that closed its doors in 2014 has been reborn as one of Japan's most unusual places to spend the night - classrooms, blackboards, and all. Japan has a surplus of empty schools. Decades of demographic decline have left hundreds of perfectly solid buildings standing …

Pick up the rotary phone in the lobby and you'll hear a voicemail from decades ago - a small, strange touch that sums up what The Georgian is trying to do. This is a hotel that wants you to know it has history, but doesn't want you to take it …

Paris has close to 40 public swimming pools, but only one of them has a novel's protagonist named after it, hosted the debut of the bikini, and spent more than two decades as an abandoned canvas for graffiti artists before reopening as a five-star hotel. The Molitor, on the western …

Millions of people pour into Switzerland's Jungfrau region every year, and almost all of them stick to the same handful of villages and viewpoints. Berghotel Obersteinberg is not one of them. To get here you climb 850 vertical meters (2,790 feet) above Stechelberg on foot, since no road, cable car, …

There's a hill in the middle of Finnish farmland where, if you weren't told otherwise, you'd assume a plane had crash-landed. It hasn't. A decommissioned Saab 340B passenger aircraft sits there deliberately, wingless, fitted out with beds, a sauna, and a working set of cockpit controls you're actually allowed to …

There's a version of "eco resort" that means a few solar panels and a sign about towel reuse. Ulaman is not that. This is a place where the walls are literally compressed earth, the staircases are woven bamboo, and there's a hand-carved wine cave hidden behind a stone wall that …

A hotel got shot in the crossfire of a presidential scandal, hosted the first screen pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and somehow still manages to feel like the calmest place on one of the world's loudest beaches. That's Copacabana Palace in a nutshell: a century-old Art Deco block …

There are wildlife encounters, and then there's watching a family of wild elephants amble straight through a hotel reception on their way to raid a mango tree. At Mfuwe Lodge, in Zambia's South Luangwa National Park, this isn't a staged photo opportunity or a rare fluke. It's an annual event …

At Shanghai Snow World Hotel, you can ski-in, ski-out, and still make your teppanyaki reservation by 7pm - no mountain required. The hotel sits inside a vast climate-controlled dome in Pudong, where the snow is real, the slopes are certified by Guinness World Records, and your room door opens directly …

In the far southeastern corner of Utah, where the Colorado Plateau breaks apart into red rock and silence, a resort sits pressed against 60-meter (200-foot) sandstone cliffs as though it has always been there. Bluff Dwellings Resort & Spa is 10 buildings and 56 rooms stacked and weathered-looking against the …

Dundgovi Province in southern Mongolia is not on most people's radar, which is precisely the point. The Gobi Desert here is vast, dry, and almost completely silent - a semi-arid steppe that nomads have traditionally called the "Steppe to Get Lost." Gobi Caravanserai sits in the middle of it, next …