One Indian hotel is among the top 50 in the world. Full list here

Oberoi Amarvilas, Agra included in the list of World’s Top 50 Hotel.

The founders of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants and Bars list have crowned the best hotel in the world for the first time, and it is Passalacqua on Lake Como.

The small 24-room hotel only opened in June 2022 after years of restoration of the 18th-century building, which has hosted guests as illustrious as Napoleon Bonaparte, Winston Churchill and Vincenzo Bellini, who have made it their home . 19th century. The hotel’s immediate, meteoric rise in popularity among the jet set is largely due to its charismatic owners Paolo, Antonella and Valentina De Santis, who made the hotel a true labor of love and who had a built-in following as owners of the beloved Grand Hotel Tremezzo, also on Lake Como. (Rates at Passalacqua start at about $1,800 per night for the following summer season.)

“If you can dream it, you can do it! Here we are!” said Valentina De Santis, visibly moved as she accepted the top prize. “We don’t have big shoulders behind us and we still got here.”

A series of iconic Asian stays followed just behind Passalacqua. The top five was completed by Rosewood Hong Kong; Four Seasons Chao Praya River, Bangkok; The House of Lords, Hong Kong; and Aman Tokyo. La Mamounia, in Marrakech, followed: a triumph for a city still reeling from the devastating earthquake on September 8.

Despite the Asia-heavy top 10, the list was heavily skewed in Europe, leaving viewers on the livestream wondering if these were Europe’s 50 best hotels, with properties on that continent taking 21 of the 50 spots. Outside of two entries in New York City, the Aman and Equinox, no other hotels in the US made the cut. Also notable: Independent hotels far outpaced branded entities; Marriott and Hilton combined to claim zero entries, although Aman and Four Seasons each took home four nods. Maybourne Hotel Group and Oetker Collection each took home three: both lesser-known brands, but loved by luxury consumers.

The ruling, which took place under the dramatic medieval arches of London’s Guildhall, marks the first hotel-focused list from the team at 50 Best, known for its global and regional restaurant and bar lists – all curated by British company William. Reed business media. In the 21 years that the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list has created new global destinations like Copenhagen and Lima, they’ve gone from secondary cities to bucket-list culinary destinations.

“There are multiple facets that make a list like this successful,” explains William Drew, director of content at William Reed, adding that the list of hotels has been in the making for nearly a decade. “How it drives business to the hotels is important, and on a slightly less empirical level, how it encourages discovery – cultural discovery – and encourages travel to new parts of the world that you might not otherwise have done.” (The title sponsor for the first World’s 50 Best Hotels list is SevenRooms, a back-end technology platform for restaurants and hotels.)

This is especially true when it comes to the 50 best restaurants. But when it came to this year’s list of hotels, the potential to chart new destinations remained largely untapped.

In addition to La Mamounia (No. 6), Marrakech notched another entry, Royal Mansour (No. 23); it would be a tremendous boon for the city if the awards give travelers confidence in their ability to travel to the Red City, which was largely spared from the earthquake’s damage and relies heavily on the tourism economy. Sri Lanka could also benefit from this; At number 38, Amangalla may have a less prominent position on the list, but it would rightly draw attention to a country where tourism has struggled to take root, despite a huge wealth of hospitality, cuisine and cultural appeal.

The process by which World’s 50 Best compiles its rankings is based on the personal experience of 580 judges assigned to their roles by regional department heads called academy chairs. These judges each vote on the top seven hotels, in order of preference, that they have stayed in over the past 24 months (future iterations of the list will reduce this window to 18 months). Judges may work within the industry as a hotelier, staff, travel agent or journalist – including those typically hosted for free on press trips and familiarization tours – or be considered experts simply because they lead a particularly peripatetic lifestyle.

In addition to the 50 best hotels, special awards were presented to six properties: including Soneva Fushi in the Maldives was named the Lost Explorer Best Beach Hotel (the best hotel within 20 meters of a beach) and Capella Bangkok was honored as the Nikka Best New Hotel , which recognizes the highest-rated hotel opened during the first two-year voting period, from May 2021 to May 2023.

Other special awards included the Flor de Caña Eco Hotel, a sustainability award that went to the Singita Lodges Kruger National Park in South Africa, where conservation and social empowerment are top priorities; The hotels source chefs from their own culinary school that trains at-risk local young people – and from the Carlo Alberto Vermouth Best Boutique Hotel, awarded to The Newt in Somerset as the best-rated independent hotel with 50 or fewer rooms.

A seventh special award went to Sonu Shivdasani, CEO of Soneva, and the only person recognized individually at the ceremony. (The award is for being “a force for good in the global hotel industry.”) His three resorts, including No. 7 Soneva Fushi and No. 36 Soneva Jani, are temples of sustainable luxury; the latter resort, in the Maldives, has both overwater villas with their own water slides and its own glass recycling factory, all on a small private atoll.

When asked whether the ongoing effects of the pandemic – such as the slow reopening of borders in Asia – could affect the rankings, Drew expressed confidence in the system. “I am confident that the situation is fairly balanced and that the parts of the world that were slower to emerge from lockdown have caught up somewhat due to pent-up demand,” he says. And indeed, Asia performed spectacularly.

But geographic diversity has been a challenge. Drew says a strong emphasis was placed on creating a geographically diverse jury, to ensure the list had the potential to reflect the entire world and not just the major capitals that attract the largest number of international visitors. Still, he admitted that this was quite a task. “It’s never going to be a perfect, completely just system. That’s not possible. This is the best we can make.”

There is only one hotel in South America on the list: the Rosewood Sao Paolo. And of all the incredible, ultra-luxurious safari lodges on the African continent, only Singita Lodges Kruger National Park was recognized. (The same issue of representation plagued a recent La Liste hotel ranking, which ranked Belmond Hotel Cipriani as the best in the world; that hotel was not in the 50 best in the world at all.) Despite the fact that international travel to Japan and Hong Kong was only will resume in October 2022 and January 2023. These destinations were represented by three properties in the top ten, perhaps reflecting the fact that even the most well-traveled professionals can only reach so many corners of the world in the space of two years. span. Indeed, these travel experts will prioritize what’s new, or, in the case of post-pandemic travel, what’s newly available to them — which probably explains why this list leaned more toward the buzzy than the best overall.

How do you compare a colorful beach resort in St. Barth with an urban oasis whose lobby is on the 33rd floor of Tokyo’s Otemachi Tower? Drew says the complexity of the proposal – the apples and oranges of it all – is what makes the list interesting. “We want there to be a discussion about what makes a great hotel, because everyone’s answer is slightly different,” he explains. “And that’s positive for us. It makes it dynamic and keeps it moving and constantly evolving.”

Here is the complete list of the 50 best hotels in the world.

1. Passalacqua, Lake Como, Italy
2. Rosewood Hong Kong
3. Four Seasons Chao Praya River, Bangkok
4. The House of Lords, Hong Kong
5. Aman Tokyo
6. La Mamounia, Marrakesh, Morocco
7. Soneva Fushi, Maldives
8. One and only Mandarina, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
9. Four Seasons Florence, Italy
10. Mandarin Oriental Bangkok
11. Capella Bangkok (Nikka award for best new hotel)
12. The Calile, Brisbane
13. Chablé Yucatan, Chocolá, Mexico
14. Aman Venice
15. Singita Lodges Kruger National Park (Flor de Caña Eco Hotel Award)
16. Claridge’s, London
17. Lotteries Singapore
18. Nihi Sumba, Indonesia
19. Hotel Esencia, Tulum, Mexico
20. La Sirenuse, Positano, Italy
21. Borgo Egnazia, Savalletri, Italy
22. The Connaught, London
23. Royal Mansour, Marrakesh, Morocco
24. Four seasons of Madrid
25. Aman New York
26. Maybourne Riviera, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France
27. Rosewood Sao Paulo
28. Capella Singapore
29. Le Bristol, Paris
30. Park Hyatt Kyoto
31. La Réserve, Paris
32. Gleneagles, Auchterarder, Scotland
33. Hotel du Cap Eden Roc, Antibes, France
34. Cheval Blanc, Paris
35. Four Seasons Astir Palace, Athens
36. Soneva Jani, Maldives
37. The Newt, Bruton, UK (Best Boutique Hotel Award)
38. Amangalla, Sri Lanka
39. Hoshinoya Tokyo
40. Desa Potato Head, Bali
41. Eden Rock, St Barth
42. The Siam, Bangkok
43. Badrutt Palace, St. Moritz, Switzerland
44. Atlantis The Royal, Dubai
45. Oberoi Amarvilas, Agra, India
46. Nomad London
47. The Savoy, London
48. Equinox New York
49. Six senses Ibiza
50. Hôtel de Crillon, Paris