THE LIST has existed unofficially for some years now. Whenever a friend or colleague would travel overseas, we would invariably get the question: “What’s the best hotel in _?” To help give informed answers, we’d ask a few basic questions: what’s your budget? purpose of trip? who are you traveling with? Then we’d give them a shortlist of properties, and hope for the best.

This list of hotels became the “go-to” properties for those cities, and we would recommend them over and over. But what about cities where we hadn’t spent much time or had the chance to fully explore the hotel landscape? Well, we’d have to put in the legwork—and that’s exactly what we did in compiling THE LIST. Over a six-month period, we stayed at or visited some 200+ hotels in 11 cities around the globe.

Before going into a city, we would do extensive research to come up with our own shortlist of properties to visit—usually between 40 and 50 hotels per city. Then, over a period of days or weeks, we would hit the pavement and visit or stay at hotel after hotel. We would pull sheets off beds, pick through mini-bars, quiz hotel staff and talk to our friends and colleagues in the travel and hotel industry to build a consensus validating our selections.