Our Hotels

At last count, the British Tourist Authority had more than 60,000 registered lodging establishments on their database. How, though, can a traveller sift through all those hotels to find just the perfect place to stay? For that matter, can someone planning what to do on a holiday really take the time to sort through a mountain of brochures – or, for that matter, scores of Web sites? The Internet today is packed with sites suggesting that because they have lots of hotels or attractions listed, they must be effective. At Best Loved Hotels, we take a different tack – we realise that what a discriminating traveller really requires isn’t just a massive list of attractions of varying quality, but instead a well-compiled showcase of interesting types of places to stay for all tastes and budgets.

Hotels appearing on this Web site or in our print edition are invited by our editorial team to become Best Loved member hotels. However, it’s no easy task! Selecting our Best Loved members isn’t simply about creating a list of deluxe or expensive hotels, but about identifying the unique characteristics about a place that we feel deserves a wider audience. In putting together our list of invitees, we not only visit each hotel, but also do exhaustive research into a hotel’s ratings and awards from independent inspectorates, including the national tourist boards, the Automobile Association, the Royal Automobile Club and others. In addition, we also pay attention to hotels’ affiliations or brands as a way to even more selectively narrow down our selection. (If you’d like to know more about the ratings and awards we display on the Best Loved Hotels site, click here.)

However, ratings and awards can’t say everything about a hotel – it’s far more important what the guests think! One thing we make sure to do every time we visit a hotel is take a peek at what’s written in its guestbook – and we take these comments back with us to use on each hotel’s Web page. In our view, these lines are the single most important endorsement of a hotel, and we urge you to take a look.

Finally, we wish you the best of luck – and, hopefully, a good deal of fun – looking through the information you’ll find on this site. We’re very proud to say that no two Best Loved hotels are alike; each offers something special, and we know each hotelier and his or her team will go out of their way to insure that your stay is both enjoyable and memorable.