Best hotels of 2014
1The results of?TripAdvisor’s?annual hotel popularity contest are out today, and internationally, Italy leads the pack with 152 winning hotels, followed by the United Kingdom with 145. The USA and France each has 144 lodgings on the list.
The wide-ranging?Travelers’ Choice Awards?crown 7,123 winners (we’ll spare you the full list), including overall top-rated hotels, along with bests in these six categories: bargain, B&Bs and inns, family, luxury, romance, and small hotels. This is the 12?thyear the website, which posts millions of user-generated hotel reviews, has crunched the numbers to compile overall rankings based on intangibles such as service, quality and value.
But a scan of current accolades compared with last year’s winners highlights the mercurial nature of online reviews. Only one of 2013’s worldwide top-rated hotels made the 2014 list. And last year’s worldwide and U.S. overall winner, the Four Seasons Resort Hualalai at Historic Ka’upulehu, Kailua-Kona Hawaii, not only didn’t make the worldwide list, it plummeted to ninth place among U.S. hotels. Only three hotels on 2013’s U.S. list are back in 2014. And no U.S. hotel made it to the top 10 on the worldwide list.
Other results: The average nightly rate of the top-hotel award winners is $366; bargain is $91; B&Bs and inns is $138; family is $237; luxury is $467; romance is $356; and small hotels is $301.
Two new Travelers’ Choice categories this year are best hotels for romance and families. Gone is a shout-out for best service, which spawned some curious outcomes in 2013, such as the budget Clarion Inn in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., (No. 4) edging out the aforementioned overall top-ranked Fours Seasons Hualalai, which came in fifth.
TripAdvisor’s top 10 hotels in the world:
- 1, Pontresina, Switzerland
- 1, Hong Kong (No. 5 in 2013)
- 1, Lankanfushi, Maldives
- 1, La Fortuna de San Carlos, Costa Rica
- 1, Udaipur, India
- 1, Quito, Ecuador
- 1, Lindos, Greece
- 1, Punta de Mita, Mexico
- 1, Mumbai, India
- 1, Toronto
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