The Le Hotelist 100 Is Here
We've been building toward this since the first hotel went on the list. Today there's a ranked one: The Le Hotelist 100 — one hundred independent U.S. hotels worth knowing about, in order, with the number that got each one there.
It is not the hundred most famous hotels. Half of them you've probably never heard of. It's the hundred that score highest on the Le Hotelist Score — our 0–10 rating built from five things we actually measure: design, location, service, value, and quiet. No chains. No soft-brands. Nobody can pay to move up, and nobody ever will.
What's on it
The top of the list, at the moment, looks like this: The Henson in Windham. East Rock Inn and Granville House, both in Great Barrington, a few miles apart and completely different hotels. Post Ranch Inn on its cliff in Big Sur. Washington School House in Park City — an 1889 schoolhouse with twelve rooms. A 1960s adobe outside Santa Fe called the Bobcat Inn, eight rooms, a fire pit, coyotes at night.
The scores are close at the top — nine hotels within two-tenths of a point — because that's honest. These are all excellent. The list separates them anyway, and the sub-scores tell you why: INNESS has the single highest Design score in the country; The Bend has the highest Quiet.
The awards
Six of them this year, pulled from the same data: Hotel of the Year, Best for Design, Best for Food, Best for Quiet, Best Value, and Best Weekend From New York. They're on the list page, at the top.
It moves
The 100 isn't frozen. We refetch guest reviews every week and recompute every score, so a hotel that opens a serious restaurant, or gets a run of great reviews, or drops the ball on service, moves. Check back. The 2026 edition is the one that's live now.
Why a hundred
Because fifty felt too short and two hundred felt like we'd stopped being selective. A hundred is enough to cover the country — every region we're deep in has at least a few on it — and small enough that being on it means something. Roughly one in five of the hotels we list makes the cut.
It's also a number that travels. "One of the Le Hotelist 100" is a thing a hotel can put on its website, a thing a writer can cite, a thing you can remember. That's the point of doing it as a list and not just a filter.
Notes
- Hotels that score well get a badge for their own site. It links back here and updates itself.
- If you'd rather not read a list of a hundred, tell us what you're after and we'll hand you five.