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Best Hotels, City by City

Booking sites rank hotels by price and star rating, which tells you nothing about whether a place suits the way you travel. These guides do the opposite: every pick names the one traveller it is wrong for, and every walking distance is measured.

Emma, who writes the Journey Finder hotel guides, standing on a Paris street with the Eiffel Tower behind her

Emma

Published

In Brief

What makes these hotel guides different?

Each one names the traveller every pick is wrong for, measures the walk to a real landmark rather than estimating it, and shows price bands with the date they were checked. The aim is that you book once and do not second-guess it.

Key takeaways

  • The one traveller each hotel is wrong for, stated plainly
  • Routed walking distances, plus the climb where the city is steep
  • Price bands with a dated rate check, not invented numbers

Choose a city

Abisko

Algarve

Antigua

Atlanta

Banff

Brussels

Caloundra

Corfu

Florence

Funchal

Gold Coast

Gothenburg

Honolulu

Houston

Hurghada

Ivalo

Kiruna

Lake Garda

Las Vegas

Levi

London

Majorca

Melbourne

Menorca

Miami

Munich

Naples

Negril

New York

Paris

Positano

Rhodes

Riviera Maya

San Francisco

Sardinia

Seychelles

Stockholm

Sydney

Tenerife

Valencia

Warsaw

How these guides work

What goes into a pick, and what does not.

Never by price alone, which is what the booking sites already do and the reason their pages are interchangeable. Each guide picks eight to twelve properties that between them cover the real traveller types for that city, then says plainly which traveller each one is wrong for. A hotel that is perfect for a couple and hopeless for a family should be described that way rather than given a score out of ten.

Yes, and that is deliberate. Every walking time is a routed pedestrian path to a named landmark in that city, not a straight line and not an estimate copied from a listing. Where a city has serious gradients we publish the height difference too, because in a place like Funchal a ten-minute walk can involve seventy metres of climb and the map will never tell you that.

Because hotels do not publish fixed nightly rates. They all run live booking engines, so any number printed on a page like this is out of date almost immediately. Each guide states the date its rate check was run, what was actually measured, and what each band means, so you can judge the guide rather than trust it.

It depends far more on the city's event calendar than on any general rule. Somewhere with a flat climate and one huge annual event needs early booking for that week and very little notice the rest of the year. Each guide has a booking-window section that gives the reason rather than a generic instruction to book early.

Continue Planning Your Trip

Photo credits (80)

Photos via Wikimedia Commons, used under their respective licences.