A shortlist of the best hotels in each city

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We'll keep you up-to-date on all the latest hotel openings around the world, and offer a range of travel-related media, from the best budget hotels in Tokyo to the top hotel bars around the world. So stay tuned!

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What is theList ?

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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.

What were (are) we looking for? Well, hotel preference is a very personal thing. Some people like soft beds, others hard. Some people like very attentive service, while others prefer a hands-off approach. Some people want simple, modern design, while others prefer classic luxury. In short, there is no one style that suits everyone. So we just went with what we consider to be a few universal norms— clean, comfortable and stylish rooms, good location, great service and value. Yes, value. If a hotel is going to cost 1200 euros, it damn well better be worth it. We also typically eschewed big chains and typical 5-star luxury brands for hotels that offered something unique or exceptional—but this was not always the case (e.g., Singapore, Seoul and Tokyo, to name a few).

In short, THE LIST is created to help you narrow down your hotel search. Some curated hotel booking sites have dozens and dozens of properties, which to us is too many (at least for us). We’d much prefer to have someone in the know narrow down that short list to and even shorter list. And that, dear fellow traveler, is what we have done for you in THE LIST.

Happy and safe travels!!

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