Why we built Hotel Please

Every city has a few hotels worth going out of your way for. Finding them is harder than it should be.

There are two million hotels in the world. Most booking sites sort them by price, every review score lands somewhere around 4.3, and the photos all look the same. The good ones are in there. Nothing points you to them.

We think that’s a shame, because a great hotel is one of the best things a city has. The lobby is a beautiful room anyone can walk into. You can order a coffee and sit for an hour in a space somebody spent years getting right, and nobody asks why you’re there.

Good hotels also stick around. Restaurants close and shops change hands, but a hotel that opens well tends to stay open for decades and slowly becomes part of how a city sees itself. Behind each one is somebody who took a big risk on one specific idea and then built it.

Our mark is a front desk bell, melting. Every hotel in the world has one, and ringing it is how you ask a hotel for something. The melting is borrowed from Salvador Dalí, whose soft clocks hang in a painting called The Persistence of Memory. That’s the kind of hotel we’re looking for: the ones that stay with you long after you check out.

Hotel Please is our attempt to do those places justice. We research every hotel ourselves, choose the photos, and rate each one across eight vibes, from gold down to listed. Gold is rare on purpose. The bar is whether a hotel is notable, not what it costs. A perfect $80 guesthouse belongs here. A forgettable $800 tower doesn’t.

No hotel pays to be included, and nothing here is sponsored. If a city only has a handful of hotels we’d stand behind, that’s how many we list.