The 50 Best Hotels in the World 2026: Has the Ranking Lost the Plot?

Friday newsletters always feature travel contests, tips, or news.

The 50 Best Hotels in the World 2026: Has This Ranking Lost the Plot?

Every year, the announcement of The World’s 50 Best Hotels generates enormous attention in the luxury-travel industry. Hotels celebrate their positions, destinations highlight their successes, and travellers discover properties they may not previously have considered. The 2026 edition has now been unveiled, with Rosewood Hong Kong once again taking the coveted number-one position. But after looking through this year’s ranking, I find myself questioning not only some of the individual choices, but also the ranking itself. There are certainly some exceptional hotels here, but there are also several placements that I find genuinely difficult to understand. More importantly, the ranking feels remarkably similar to last year’s, while the extraordinary concentration of hotels from Bangkok and Hong Kong near the top raises some obvious questions about what this list is actually measuring.

I have stayed at many of the hotels featured on this year’s list, as well as numerous properties that are absent from it, so here’s my take on The World’s 50 Best Hotels of 2026. Before getting into that, here is the complete 2026 list.

The 50 Best Hotels in the World 2026

Rosewood Hong Kong — Hong Kong
Capella Bangkok — Bangkok
Four Seasons Bangkok at Chao Phraya River — Bangkok
Atlantis The Royal — Dubai
Passalacqua — Lake Como
Rosewood São Paulo — São Paulo
Mandarin Oriental Qianmen — Beijing
The Upper House — Hong Kong
Chablé Yucatán — Mexico
Mandarin Oriental Bangkok — Bangkok
Aman Tokyo — Tokyo
Four Seasons Firenze — Florence
Claridge’s — London
Hôtel de Crillon — Paris
Jumeirah Marsa Al Arab — Dubai
Capella Sydney — Sydney
Raffles Singapore — Singapore
Casa Maria Luigia — Modena
Le Bristol Paris — Paris
Cheval Blanc Paris — Paris
Desa Potato Head — Bali
San Ysidro Ranch — Santa Barbara
One&Only Mandarina — Riviera Nayarit
Bulgari Hotel Tokyo — Tokyo
Las Ventanas al Paraíso — Los Cabos
Royal Mansour Marrakech — Marrakech
Four Seasons Hotel Astir Palace — Athens
Raffles London at The OWO — London
Copacabana Palace — Rio de Janeiro
The Taj Mahal Palace — Mumbai
The Peninsula Istanbul — Istanbul
Bulgari Hotel Roma — Rome
Patina Osaka — Osaka
Mount Nelson — Cape Town
Nihi Sumba — Sumba
Badrutt’s Palace — St. Moritz
Park Hyatt Kyoto — Kyoto
Hôtel du Couvent — Nice
Portrait Milano — Milan
Hôtel de Paris Monte-Carlo — Monaco
Plaza Athénée — Paris
Hotel Sacher Vienna — Vienna
Estelle Manor — Oxfordshire
Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc — Antibes
Amangiri — Utah
The Peninsula Hong Kong — Hong Kong
Maroma — Riviera Maya
Aman Nai Lert Bangkok — Bangkok
The Connaught — London
San Domenico Palace — Taormina

Not much has changed

My first reaction to the 2026 ranking was simply how familiar it feels. Rosewood Hong Kong remains number one, while Capella Bangkok and Four Seasons Bangkok remain in the top three, merely swapping positions from last year. Passalacqua remains in the top five, The Upper House has moved further into the top ten, and Mandarin Oriental Bangkok remains among the world’s highest-ranked hotels. Looking at the top of the list, it is difficult to escape the impression that we are largely looking at the same group of established favorites that dominated the 2025 edition.

Of course, consistency can be interpreted positively. If the same hotels continue to receive votes from experienced travelers, perhaps they really are delivering consistently exceptional experiences. But the lack of major movement also makes me question how much significance we should attach to the annual ranking. A hotel moving from number 8 to number 12 does not suddenly become a worse hotel, just as one moving from number 30 to number 15 has not necessarily improved dramatically. These movements are ultimately changes in voting patterns rather than precise measurements of changes in hotel quality.

This is particularly interesting when compared with The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, where the rankings can be considerably more volatile. Previous number-one restaurants disappear from the top 50 altogether in subsequent years, whereas the hotel ranking seems to have developed a much stronger sense of continuity. Rosewood Hong Kong was number one in 2025 and remains number one in 2026. Perhaps it genuinely deserves to retain the title (an as you can read in my review, it is a sublime hotel), but it is worth remembering that this is a subjective vote rather than an objective annual reassessment of every great hotel in the world.

Bangkok and Hong Kong dominate the top

The geographical concentration at the top of the 2026 ranking is particularly striking. Bangkok has three hotels in the top ten alone: Capella Bangkok at number two, Four Seasons Bangkok at number three and Mandarin Oriental Bangkok at number ten. Aman Nai Lert Bangkok also appears at number 48, giving the Thai capital four hotels in the overall top 50. Hong Kong has Rosewood Hong Kong at number one and The Upper House at number eight, while The Peninsula Hong Kong appears at number 46.

There is no question that both cities have exceptional luxury-hotel scenes. Bangkok has become one of the world’s great destinations for high-end hospitality, combining outstanding service with an impressive selection of new and established luxury properties. Hong Kong has also long been a major center for luxury hotels, with a concentration of sophisticated urban properties that few cities can match. However, three Bangkok hotels occupying three of the first ten positions in a global ranking is an extraordinary claim. When you consider the sheer number of exceptional hotels across Europe, Africa, the Americas, the Middle East, Asia and Oceania, it is reasonable to wonder whether the distribution genuinely reflects global hotel quality or whether it partly reflects where the voting panel has traveled and which destinations are currently receiving the most attention.

The same question applies to Hong Kong. Rosewood Hong Kong may well be an exceptional hotel, but placing The Upper House at number eight means that two Hong Kong hotels are ranked among the eight best hotels on the planet. That is a remarkably strong representation for one city, particularly when numerous renowned properties elsewhere in the world are absent from the list altogether.

The methodology explains a lot

The 50 Best Hotels ranking is based on more than 800 voters across 13 geographical regions. The panel includes travel journalists, hoteliers and experienced luxury travelers. Each voter selects seven hotels they have personally stayed at during the previous three years and ranks those hotels according to their own preferences. There is no predetermined scoring system covering service, design, food, rooms, location, facilities, wellness or value, and the voting process is independently audited.

That methodology is perfectly legitimate, but it is important to understand what it means. This is not a hotel inspection system in which every property is judged according to the same criteria. There is no scorecard determining that one hotel receives 98 points for service while another receives 94 for its rooms. Instead, each voter is effectively saying which seven hotel experiences impressed them most, and those individual preferences are then aggregated into a global ranking.

That makes the list an interesting reflection of the experiences and preferences of a highly experienced group of travelers, but it does not make it an objective measurement of hotel quality. A hotel can be exceptional in almost every conventional sense and still fail to receive enough votes because relatively few members of the voting panel have stayed there. Conversely, a fashionable hotel that is widely visited by the people represented on the panel has many more opportunities to accumulate votes.

The requirement that voters must have stayed at a property within the previous three years is sensible because it keeps the ranking relatively current. However, it also introduces a natural limitation. The ranking is inevitably influenced by where the voters have been recently, which is not necessarily the same thing as identifying every hotel that offers an exceptional experience anywhere in the world.

Some of the choices are difficult to understand

This is where the list becomes particularly interesting, because there are several properties whose inclusion and positioning I find difficult to reconcile with my own experience of luxury hotels. One of the most obvious examples is Desa Potato Head in Bali, which has been placed at number 21. I understand why the hotel attracts attention: it has a distinctive design, a strong lifestyle concept and a clear identity that differentiates it from conventional luxury resorts. But does that make it the 21st-best hotel in the world? Personally, I simply cannot see it.

In fact, I would go considerably further. As you can read in my review, Potato Head does not even come close to the top ten best hotels in Bali, let alone number 21 in the world. Bali has an extraordinary collection of luxury resorts, including properties with exceptional settings, highly private villas, outstanding service and far more comprehensive overall guest experiences(e.g. COMO Shambhala, the Aman properties, Soori, Alila Villas Uluwatu, etc …). Seeing Potato Head ranked above hotels such as Royal Mansour Marrakech, Four Seasons Astir Palace, Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, Amangiri, The Peninsula Hong Kong and The Connaught is therefore one of the placements that makes me question the ranking most strongly.

The Upper House Hong Kong at number eight produces a similar reaction. The hotel is undoubtedly attractive, elegant and beautifully designed, and André Fu’s interiors have become one of its defining strengths. I can understand why experienced travellers appreciate its relatively intimate and residential atmosphere in a city dominated by much larger luxury hotels. But placing it at number eight in the entire world is a very different proposition, since it lacks facilities as you can read in my review. It means ranking it above Aman Tokyo, Four Seasons Firenze, Claridge’s, Hôtel de Crillon, Le Bristol and Cheval Blanc Paris, among many others. I find that hierarchy extremely difficult to justify based purely on the overall hotel experience.

The disappearing hotels

Another fascinating aspect of this year’s ranking is looking at the hotels that have disappeared from it. Several highly respected properties that were comfortably inside the 2025 top 50 are no longer present in 2026. Soneva Fushi, for example, was ranked number 28 last year but has now disappeared. Hotel Il Pellicano, which was number 26, is also gone, as are La Mamounia, The Emory and The Calile, among others.

It would obviously be absurd to conclude that these hotels suddenly became substantially worse. Their absence simply means that they did not receive enough votes to remain in the top 50 this year. The same principle works in reverse: when a hotel climbs dramatically, it does not necessarily mean that its actual guest experience has improved by ten, twenty or thirty positions. It means that it received more support from this year’s voters.

This illustrates one of the fundamental weaknesses of annual hotel rankings. Readers can easily interpret movement up or down the list as a change in objective quality, when in reality it is largely a change in collective opinion. The hotel itself may be virtually identical to the one that appeared in the previous edition.

What is actually being compared?

Ultimately, my biggest problem with The 50 Best Hotels is that it attempts to put radically different hotel experiences onto one numerical ladder. Passalacqua, Atlantis The Royal, Aman Tokyo, Nihi Sumba, Claridge’s and Rosewood Hong Kong are not merely different hotels; they represent completely different interpretations of luxury hospitality. One traveller may value privacy and serenity above everything else, another may prioritise a spectacular urban setting and restaurants, while someone else may consider an extraordinary natural environment or a historic sense of place to be essential.

There is no universal formula capable of determining that one of these experiences is objectively number five while another deserves number 35. A tiny Italian villa, a vast Dubai resort, a Japanese urban sanctuary and a remote Indonesian island retreat can all be exceptional, but they are exceptional for entirely different reasons. The more diverse the list becomes, the less meaningful the precise numerical order becomes.

I would therefore find a category-based approach much more useful. The best urban hotels, best beach resorts, best safari lodges, best boutique hotels, best historic hotels, best wellness resorts and perhaps best hotels for privacy would provide travellers with far more practical information than a single list attempting to determine whether one property is number 17 and another is number 37.

A useful list, but not an objective verdict

Despite all of my criticism, I don’t think The 50 Best Hotels should be dismissed. There are many genuinely exceptional properties on the list, and it remains an excellent source of inspiration. Aman Tokyo, Passalacqua, Rosewood São Paulo, Mandarin Oriental Qianmen, Chablé Yucatán, Four Seasons Firenze, Claridge’s, Royal Mansour, Four Seasons Astir Palace, Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc and Amangiri are all fascinating hotels that deserve attention, even if I would personally rank some of them very differently.

The list is also useful as a snapshot of current trends in luxury hospitality. The strength of Bangkok and Hong Kong is clearly significant, as is the continued appeal of highly designed hotels, distinctive sense of place and increasingly personalised experiences. It shows us which hotels are generating excitement among influential travellers and which destinations are attracting attention from the luxury-hospitality industry.

But I would treat the ranking as a barometer rather than a definitive verdict. I would look at the hotels themselves rather than becoming too preoccupied with their numerical positions. Being number 34 does not automatically make a hotel inferior to number 14, just as being number 21 does not make a hotel objectively superior to every property that failed to make the list.

The 2026 edition is therefore interesting precisely because it is so debatable. Rosewood Hong Kong retains the number-one position, Bangkok and Hong Kong dominate the upper reaches, many familiar names remain firmly established, several respected hotels disappear completely and some of the new or returning choices are, at least to me, very difficult to understand. Perhaps that is ultimately the real purpose of these rankings: not to settle the debate about which hotels are the best in the world, but to start one.

And if Desa Potato Head is genuinely supposed to be the 21st-best hotel in the world, while some of the extraordinary hotels that are missing don’t even make the top 50, then I think we have every right to question exactly what this ranking is trying to tell us.