This site is a personal project. It is not a booking platform, not a review site, and not sponsored by any hotel or hotel group. Nobody pays to be included.

We are editors, not critics. 

European Grand Hotels is a curated guide to hotels across Europe that have earned the title "Grand" — not through star ratings or influencers, but through history, architecture, and character. The hotels where composers wrote symphonies, where kings held court in exile, where writers talked too long and drank too much, and where the bar is as important as the bed.

The site began with a simple observation: what's missing is a place that treats grand hotels as what they are — cultural landmarks, not just places to sleep. The Sacher in Vienna, The Ritz in London, these buildings have stories, and the stories are worth telling.

We cover 130+ hotels across 21 countries, from the Palace hotels of St. Moritz to the clifftop retreats of the Amalfi Coast, from the spy hotels of wartime Lisbon to the literary salons of Budapest.

A note on the engravings on this site: nineteenth-century Grand Tourists were rarely without their guidebook. While ours look like they fell out of a Baedeker, they didn't exist until we prompted them, because a guide to grand hotels should look the part. Where a photograph or actual period print serves better, we use that instead.

If you think we've missed a hotel that deserves to be here, or if you'd like to share a story about one that's already listed, we'd love to hear from you.

info@europeangrandhotels.com