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When I first moved to the UAE back in mid-2011, I had come to the conclusion after several previous holidays that Dubai was the…

One of the perks of my job is being able to see the progression of hotels from mere ideas and drawings right through to…

Very often, when out and about reviewing hotels or sifting through property announcements at HotelDesigns HQ, I encounter some variation on that old hospitality…

In recent years, the global hospitality industry has been marking the steady rise in popularity of the ‘aparthotel’. And looking at the trends, it…

In March I made a long overdue trip back from the antipodean colonies to the motherland. To break up the frenetic efforts to see…

I have reviewed a Sofitel before – the Sofitel Hamburg. It was an hotel I found very difficult to like; the décor was cool…

Sleeping umbrellas and rear elevation curling around the pool, balconies giving guests a view of the beach and sea Reception lobby – click to…

Putting new in old, contemporary into antique, can be a difficult trick. Mix in English vernacular style and wave a designers’ wand. Magic in…

Breezy Bay for Bracing Blows October and the sea temperature is nearly 70 degrees, and bikini clad sunbathers catch the last rays of the…

I try to look at different types of hotels in both Reviews (166 of them) and Miniviews (and there are over 150 of those),…

For many years my practice worked for island hotel groups, the Hugglers (see Club Hotel and Spa) and the Seymours of Jersey (see the…

Going green means many things to many people, from adding solar power panels to a roof to a through total reworking of energy use….

When I stayed at the Shangri-La in Dubai I had no doubts about what I would be looking at. The review was specifically so…

Now owned since 1998 by Elite Hotels, enough time has passed since the ownership of De Vere to be able to see the image…

It stands almost as a symbolic icon of the recovery of Germany from past disasters. Top floors burned out, requisition by occupation forces, rebuilt…

Pretoria is the administrative capital of South Africa, Every morning commuter trains bring civil servants in to work, in a town with tree shaded…

Budget hotels have flourished in recession. Not only will business people trade down, but the ‘bang per buck’ element has become exaggerated as new…

The building is an existing 116 bedroom hotel in San Francisco, built in 1913. It had been recently purchased by Pebblebrook Hotel Trust and…

Last time I rode a luxury train it was the Orient Express UK end, steam pulled from London to Kidderminster, and not the blue…

In February 2005 I reported that Shangri-La had signed a lease on the space in then planned Shard, and had already started design work…

A few years ago I was in Washington to Review a couple of hotels. Staying in a Staybridge Suites I was collared by the…

Babbacombe is just along the road from Torquay – so close in fact that some people class it as Torquay suburbs, but it is…

Like many Brits, my images of America are part Hollywood, part romance,part television all tempered with the reality of numerous visits over the years….

Unmissable as you drive in to Exeter, this 60 bedroom hotel occupies a spectacular example of a re-engineered building. The hotel is a conversion…

Aquae Sulis was the Roman name for this spa. The British of course are more ‘lumpen’ than classical, so called it Bath. It has…

Seaside towns have a look about them. The ocean close by obviously, but the kind of shops they have – a strange mix of…

Lancashire can appear a very strange place full of witches and forests as well as seaside towns and industrial centres. In the late 18th…

The English aristocracy didn’t just build their country houses in England. Scattered across the whole British Isles are grand houses that remind one of…

I don’t ski. I have this image of gliding out onto the slope and slowly sinking into the snow as my weight proves too…

This is one of those accidental Reviews. They happen when a stay en-route to a targeted hotel or for some other reason finds me…

The owner lives on the other side of the bay, looking on to his hotel, or at least the Victorian seaside hotel that was…

Louvre Hotels Group brands are known to generations of UK travellers through France. My first visit to a Campanile in the 1980’s amused me….

The hotel market in Cardiff has boomed. Most of the major chains are now present, and the City has bloomed under devolved government, tourism…

Whilst football is often said to be a game of two halves, Chapmans Peak hotel, known popularly locally simply as ‘Chappies’, is a hotel…

Refreshed? Mint is the new brand name for City Inns as they continue to grow the group, this being one of two large hotels…

Falmouth has its place in history, its place as a centre of the web. Not the internet but a network of Royal Mail packet…

I’ve lost count of the number of trips I have made into what we must now call Central Europe over the last ten years….

Many things can drive the genesis of a new hotel chain, but mostly it is driven by personal views of owners. Room Mate was…

Any ski hotel will fill if it is positioned at the bottom of the ski-lifts. The Royal Spa sits on the edge of Jochberg,…

Set in the Silesian coalfields, Katowice is a city of concrete. Dotted around the skyline of this grey city are sets of the pithead…

I have just featured two hotels (Cube and Ongava) where the guests’ needs, in terms of why they are at those locations, has driven…

The boy was nervous, shining his torch carefully into the shadows, walking slowly so we were treading on his heels. The man with the…

I have a fascination with railway hotels. In Britain, they were part of the revolution in travel and hotel use in the mid-nineteenth century….

Cube’s name is expressive. The building is a glass cube, unashamedly modernist amongst the traditional Tyrolean valley chalet style architecture. The ‘shock of the…

Noel Coward’s ‘Brief Encounter’ was set on a railway platform in which a couple waiting for different trains fall for one another. Returning to…

We tend to think of the USA as a new country filled with new buildings. However the preservation of old buildings is as much…

South Africa is in the Southern Hemisphere, which means its seasons are the reverse of those in the Northern Hemisphere – as upside down…

To look into the increasing popularity of small and personal luxury cruises in 2009 we headed to Scotland to sample a cruise along the…