Hotels

Lie in the bathtub at this Shanghai hotel and you can watch a plane take off. Not a distant view of a plane, half-glimpsed between buildings, but the whole show: taxiing, throttling up, lifting off, disappearing into the haze over the Yangtze Delta. The Hilton Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport, which …

Icebergs the size of buses break off an ice cap in southeast Iceland, drift across a lagoon, wash out to sea, and land back on a black sand beach as scattered blocks of ice. Hótel Jökulsárlón - Glacier Lagoon Hotel, which opened in 2024, is a short drive from that …

Most hotels don't come with a backstory involving 14,000-tonne concrete silos and a decommissioned grain terminal, but Puerto Norte Design Hotel does. The building started life as part of Rosario's old port infrastructure before being reworked into a six-floor hotel that still wears its industrial bones on the outside. Every …

A single photograph did it: covered wagons parked against blood-red cliffs, looking more like a Western film set than a working hotel. It turns out the wagons are real, they're bookable, and they sit a mile from the entrance to one of Utah's quietest national parks - one so overshadowed …

Banksy calls it a three-story cure for fanaticism, though on arrival what you actually notice first is how close the wall is – close enough that most rooms get barely 25 minutes of direct sunlight a day. The Walled Off Hotel, part functioning hotel, part gallery, part museum, and part …

Check in at Anybody and nobody hands you a room key. What you get instead is a PIN code and a tablet with a single button on it. Press it, and the room takes over from there: the lights shift, a story starts playing through hidden speakers, and for the …

At Hotel Icefiord in Ilulissat, Greenland, the staff keep a chalkboard in the restaurant where they mark a line for every whale spotted from the terrace each month. Some months it fills up fast. It's a bit of a running joke among them, but it also sums up the whole …

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, …