Welcome to The Telegraph’s guide to the 250 Best Hotels in the UK, our expert selection of the finest accommodation in the country. Our dedicated team of 60 reviewers has visited hundreds of properties across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to compile this definitive list, with each entry tried and tested.
These hotels represent the very best that UK hospitality has to offer, with properties included on the basis of their location, character, service, facilities, rooms and dining.
To help you navigate our selection, enter a postcode or region. You can also use the filters – for example, “dog friendly”, “city” or “accessible” – to refine your search.
Perhaps you’ve already visited some of the hotels on this list. Perhaps you’ll be inspired to do so now. Let us know whether you agree with our verdicts in the comments section below.
Methodology
Every hotel included has scored 8/10 or higher, which we classify as “excellent”. This is an average of six individually scored categories: location, style and character, service and facilities, rooms, food and drink, and value for money.
We know that while plenty of our readers are happy to spend hundreds of pounds a night on a weekend break, affordability is important. So 94 of the hotels here start at £200 per night or less. We’ve also tried to ensure as much of a geographical spread with these properties as possible.
How to filter the results
City and rural are fairly self-explanatory, but here’s how we’re defining the others:
Coastal: within a 20-minute walk of the sea
Family-friendly: actively welcoming of children, with appropriate accommodation and amenities, not just somewhere that technically permits them but is aimed at adults
Great gardens: destination gardens worth visiting in their own right. This doesn’t just mean Capability Brown-style, it could also be a wonderful kitchen garden
For foodies: destination dining, so if this isn’t ticked it doesn’t mean the dining is bad, just that it’s not a destination restaurant per se
Accessible: adapted rooms and access around the hotel’s main communal areas
Rail connection: within a 10-minute drive of a railway station
Meet our hotel experts
The 250 properties featured here were chosen from 2,000 UK hotel reviews by Telegraph Travel’s Hotels team:
- Rachel Cranshaw, Hotels Editor
- Emma Beaumont, Senior Commissioning Editor
- Harriet Jones, Senior Content Editor
- Patrick Hamilton Courtney, Content Editor
We are all authorities in this specific part of travel and hospitality and work with a wide network of resident destination experts, as well as travel writers who also specialise in hotels. You’ll come across many of those names on the hotels featured here. The team also worked with our two British hotel columnists, Fiona Duncan and Mark C O’Flaherty. You can also read more from our collection of 10,000 reviews of hotels around the world.