The best hotels in the world

No single body decides that, which is the honest answer. Four independent authorities each publish their own verdict: the MICHELIN Guide awards Keys, Forbes Travel Guide awards stars, The World's 50 Best Hotels publishes an annual ranking voted by an academy, and La Liste aggregates critical opinion into a score. finehotels.world combines all four into one prestige score out of 10, so the hotels at the top of this list are the ones that every system agrees on rather than the favourite of any one of them.

No hotel pays to appear here and no hotel can influence its score. The index is assembled from published award data only, and every hotel page links to the awarding body so the record can be checked independently.

It is our composite of public awards, expressed from 5.00 to 10.00. A hotel earns points for MICHELIN Keys, a Forbes Five-Star rating, placement on The World's 50 Best Hotels in 2023, 2024 and 2025 weighted equally, and a minor sway from its La Liste rating. Every hotel in the index has already cleared a real bar somewhere, so 5.00 reads as included and 10.00 as the most decorated hotel on earth. The full formula is published on the methodology page.

An image appears only where this index holds a credit for it, the licence basis it rests on, and the source it came from, and the credit is shown under the photograph with a link to that source. Where those are not held, the property is listed without a photograph.