Tag: Hotel
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InterContinental Crete – A Supermodel Hotel
The InterContinental Crete arrives like a supermodel walking into a beach club. Heads turn. Conversations stop. Everyone notices. And for the first couple of days, you completely understand why. This is an exceptionally handsome hotel. It occupies a glorious position above the sea, with views so perfectly framed they look less like scenery and more…
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Ofou to lo – An Outrageously Perfect Greek Taverna
If the gods of Olympus ever tired of ambrosia and decided to open a taverna, they would build something very like this. The sea beyond the tables is so extravagantly blue it looks as though someone has turned up the saturation on reality itself. The fish arrives with such startling freshness that you half expect…
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Moxy Barcelona Gets the Modern Hotel Just Right
I’m starting to develop a worrying affection for the Moxy brand. Worrying because, on paper, it ought to annoy me. It’s a hotel concept apparently devised by a committee of people who own trainers costing more than my first car. There’s the inevitable industrial-chic aesthetic, the communal tables, the mood lighting, the sense that someone…
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The Hopewell Hotel: A Five-Star Stay Hidden Behind a Shopping Centre and a Lift-Based IQ Test
The first thing you want to know, always, is whether it’s any good. So here it is, up front, no foreplay: yes. It’s very good. Properly good. Luxurious, clean, stylish, and, annoyingly for everywhere else, brilliantly located. But, my word, the courtship. Because the Hopewell does not so much present itself as dare you to…
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Sky High and Slightly Smug in Shenzhen
Some hotels trade on geography like it’s a personality trait. White sand beaches so soft you feel guilty walking on them. Alpine perches where you’re served fondue while staring into the moral abyss of a glacier. And then there’s this place, which has decided correctly that the most dramatic natural wonder of the modern world…
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A Modern Grand Hotel That Knows Its Manners
If modern luxury hotels were people, most would be that over eager chap at a party who insists on telling you about his watch collection before you have even found the bar. The Shangri La Qiantan, however, is something rarer: a place with enough confidence to pour you a drink first, then quietly reveal it…
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Intercontinental Shenzhen: Calm, Coffee and Clever Toilets in Shenzhen
Big international chains, when done properly, are not soulless monoliths but something closer to a warm bath drawn at precisely the right temperature. You arrive frazzled, over-stimulated, slightly cross with the world after another immigration queue that seems to have been designed by a sadist, and there it is: beige, marbled, quietly humming with competence.…
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Yotel Manchester – caffeine fuelled
Question. What’s better? A: A decent cup of coffee you have to walk to get. B: An instant coffee in your room. The answer, obviously, always has to be A. No one should ever be forced—before breakfast, before consciousness, before hope—to drink instant coffee. It is a moral failing disguised as convenience. Glad we’ve cleared…
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Mercure Oxford Eastgate Hotel: A Properly Oxford Place to Stay
Some hotels just get where they are. You know the sort: they don’t try to be something else, or to reinvent the wheel, or to pretend Oxford is in Dubai. The Mercure Oxford Eastgate is one of those rare spots that understands its brief perfectly: be Oxford, stay Oxford, breathe Oxford. And it does. You…
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Moxy Cologne Airport: The Airport Hotel That Forgot to Be Awful
Right, so here’s the thing: airport hotels should be crap. That is their function. They are not meant to be destinations, they are meant to be purgatory. They should exist in that peculiar hinterland of travel where you’ve left your home but not yet arrived anywhere, and so deserve a night in a building that…
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The Travel Critic 