Why we built Hotel Please
A love letter to great hotels.
The good ones are out there. Nothing will tell you which.
Not for lack of hotels. There are two million of them, ranked by price, every review landing somewhere between 4.0 and 4.5, the photographs uniformly bad. Somewhere in there are the twenty places worth crossing a city for, and nothing will tell you which twenty.
The members’ clubs don’t solve it either. Amex Fine Hotels, Tablet, Design Hotels — each one is a list of properties that signed an agreement. That’s a business model, not a point of view, and it means the most interesting hotel in a city is missing whenever it didn’t sign.
Which is a shame, because a hotel is a strange and generous thing. A hotel lobby is a great room anyone can walk into. You push the door, order a coffee, and sit down in a space somebody spent years and a fortune getting right. Almost nothing else in a city works that way.
And they last. Restaurants close, shops turn over, whole streets get rewritten. A hotel opens and then stays — long enough to become the place a neighborhood meets, the address a city gives its occasions, an institution nobody set out to found. Behind every one of them is a person who took an enormous risk to build one specific idea into a building.
So that is what this is for. Each hotel is researched from the sources that take hotels seriously, given photographs somebody actually chose, and rated across eight vibes — gold down to listed, and gold is rare. Notable at any price is the bar: a perfect $80 guesthouse belongs here, a forgettable $800 tower doesn’t.
No hotel pays to be included and no placement is sponsored. We don’t rank by commission, we don’t sell positions, and we’d rather leave a city thin than pad it.
We want to do justice to the passion people have put into building their hotels, all over the world.