How we classify hotels

Hotel types

Affordable

Reasonably priced for the city, based on what these hotels charge year-round rather than a headline rate. Good value in absolute terms, not merely good value for a five-star.

Boutique

Small enough to feel personal, usually under a hundred rooms, independently owned or part of a small collection, with rooms designed individually rather than to a template. Size comes first: a large hotel with beautiful interiors is not a boutique hotel.

Trendy

Design-led hotels with a social life of their own, where the bar or restaurant draws locals as well as guests, and the mood is contemporary rather than classical.

Luxury

Five-star hotels with the full service behind them: a proper restaurant, a proper bar, and staff to match. A high room rate alone does not make a hotel luxurious.

Ultra Luxury

The small group of hotels at the very top, where service, setting and reputation place them beyond the ordinary five-star.

A hotel may hold more than one of these — a small five-star house can be both Boutique and Luxury.

Some hotels carry none. That is not a judgement on quality; they are simply excellent hotels that don’t fit a category.

Central London

There is no single official boundary, so we define ours and apply it consistently.

Central London covers the neighbourhoods within easy reach of the city’s heart on foot: Mayfair, St James’s, Soho, Covent Garden, the Strand and Trafalgar Square, Bloomsbury and Holborn, Marylebone and Fitzrovia, Knightsbridge and Belgravia, Victoria and Westminster, the City of London, and the South Bank.

Kensington, Shoreditch and the wider East End, and West London sit beyond it. They are excellent places to stay, but they are not central, and we don’t describe them as such.

Distance is measured from Charing Cross, the traditional centre of London, and shown on every hotel so you can judge for yourself.