The 10 Best Luxury Hotels in the World Right Now

The first new building on the Bund waterfront in 60 years, sitting inside a 1.5km stretch architecture writers call the "Museum of International Architecture" - 52 buildings spanning Gothic to Beaux-Arts, all visible from the front steps. Excellent and consistent, but the newest member of a traditional group hasn't yet built the singular signature experience the hotels above it have.

On the Magnificent Mile, with rooms the group markets as the city's most spacious. The Peninsula Suite tops it off with a baby grand piano and a wraparound terrace over Lake Michigan - as good a reason as any to book the top floor in a lakefront city. Edges out its Shanghai sibling by a hair, mostly on that terrace.

Laced through mangrove lagoons instead of a flat beachfront lot - most of the property is only reachable by the resort's own private boats. Deluxe Overwater Lagoon Suites get their own plunge-pool terrace; Wellness Suites pair a private serenity pavilion with a dedicated Well-Being Butler on top of the regular one. Genuinely one of the Riviera Maya's destination-wedding capitals, not just marketing copy.

Part of the Rosewood collection, where the Baja desert runs straight into the Sea of Cortez - private plunge pools built against the sand, telescope-equipped terraces for stargazing, rooftop dining set up specifically for sunset. What separates it from a merely nice beach resort is density of touches: a resident astronomer, hand-carved turndown boxes, tequila tastings that go well past a bar cart. Guests describe it by staff member's name, not room number.

One of Asia's oldest continuously operating luxury hotels, and it wears that history well. The 1885 Authors' Wing - wicker furniture, framed photos of Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham - leads into the Authors' Lounge, whose afternoon tea has its own devoted following. A $90M restoration in 2019 gave the historic bones genuinely current infrastructure. It loses a little ground on exclusivity - large, storied, frequently booked - but almost nothing else in Southeast Asia matches the pedigree.

One&Only's first-ever European property, dropped onto Boka Bay about an hour from Dubrovnik, betting on two things nobody else here has - a 43,000 sq ft Chenot Espace spa (structured detox and reset, not a massage menu) and a 238-berth marina rated for superyachts, right at the property's own jetty. That marina matters more than it sounds: the resort's real competitive set isn't other hotels, it's the yachts anchored offshore.

An 1854 mansion built for the Duke of Morny, later owned by Pierre Cardin, opened as a hotel in 2015. At just 40 keys it's the smallest and most intimate property on this list by a wide margin - and every single guest gets a personal butler, not just suite bookings. Jacques Garcia's design leans hard into 19th-century Parisian style, backed by a 16-meter indoor pool inside a mirrored, colonnaded corridor. The tradeoff for that intimacy is scale - it can't match the bigger palaces' breadth of restaurants.

Opened in 1896 on Caspar Badrutt's initiative, and still owned by the Badrutt family 130 years later - a continuity almost nothing in ultra-luxury hospitality can claim. 163 rooms and 47 suites above Lake St. Moritz with the Engadine Alps as backdrop, eleven dining venues, and a free shuttle to the cable car for guests who want the mountain, not just the view. Century-old marble halls sit steps from modern lake-view suites - history without turning into a museum.

Salvador Dalí kept a permanent room here for roughly thirty years from the 1950s - the same suite, booked every year, often for a month, with Gala and reportedly a pair of ocelots on diamond leashes. That suite is the Presidential Apartment today, and the Dalí connection runs throughout - Philippe Starck's design touches, and Restaurant Le Dalí, named and designed in his honor. Belle Époque bones (gilt ceilings, a hand-painted 18th-century-style ceiling mural) paired with genuinely world-class dining edges it past Badrutt's.

LVMH-owned and opened in 2021 inside the completely rebuilt shell of the former Samaritaine department store - a 1928 Henri Sauvage building that took six years to restore. Peter Marino's first hospitality project ever treats the interior like a private art collection rather than a safe neutral palette. Every one of the 72 rooms has a direct Seine or Eiffel Tower view - not "some," all of them - and the top-floor duplex has its own pool, hammam, and wraparound Eiffel Tower terrace. A genuinely different, more ambitious idea of a Paris palace hotel.