Five
The Adlon is usually described as having been absent from Berlin for fifty-two years. It was not.
The fire came on 2 May 1945 and took all but one wing. What the usual telling leaves out is what happened next. The surviving service wing on Wilhelmstrasse reopened as a restaurant that June, was letting sixteen rooms by August, and went on trading in East Berlin until the GDR demolished it in 1984. The hotel was diminished, requisitioned and expropriated, but for most of the years it is supposed to have been gone it was still taking guests.
The first one existed because a Kaiser wanted it. Wilhelm II pressed the owners of the Palais Redern to sell so that Berlin would have a hotel to set against Paris and London, and Lorenz Adlon, a cobbler's son from Mainz, bought the site in 1905. Carl Gause and Robert Leibnitz built it in two years for seventeen million gold marks and it opened in October 1907 with the Kaiser at the inauguration. The present building, by Rainer Michael Klotz, opened on 23 August 1997: 385 rooms and suites on the same square, facing the Brandenburg Gate across Pariser Platz. Lorenz Adlon Esszimmer holds one Michelin star under Jonas Zörner, who arrived from GOLVET in February 2025.
The festive programme for this year is published and priced in full. Christmas Eve is a buffet on the Bel Etage, reception from six in the Wintergarten, at 220 euros a head with champagne, wine and beer included. Christmas Day is a champagne brunch in the same room at the same price. New Year's Eve is the Ballroom gala: reception at six, five courses from seven, a big band through dinner and a DJ after, at 700 euros a head and 90 for a child. Take the Bel Etage over the Brasserie on the twenty-fourth. The room is the reason you are there.
Affiliation · Kempinski Club 1897
Four
It opened on New Year's Eve, 1991, which is the right note to begin on, because the building spent the two and a half centuries before that as something else entirely.
Before that it was a hospital. The building went up in the early eighteenth century as Lanesborough House, for the second Viscount, and in 1733 the physicians leased it to found the original St George's. By 1747 it held fifteen wards and two hundred and fifty beds. Florence Nightingale became its first female governor in 1855 and spent the rest of the decade reforming its sanitation. Planning permission came in 1987, the conversion took three years and eighty million pounds, and the restoration that followed in 2013 took three hundred artisans and two thousand books of twenty-three-and-a-quarter carat gold leaf, laid by hand.
Ninety-three rooms and suites. A butler comes with every one of them, not only with the suites, around the clock and at no charge. Two Michelin Keys in the 2026 selection. The Lanesborough Grill is run by Shay Cooper, who won stars at The Bingham and at The Goring, though the Grill itself holds none.
The season runs from 5 November 2026 to 6 January 2027, and this hotel publishes earlier than almost anyone, which matters if Christmas lunch in London is the specific thing you want. On the list so far: festive afternoon tea, a Penhaligon's cream tea, jazz nights through December, Christmas in Residence with a decorated room and its own tree, and a New Year's Eve dinner of six courses followed by a live band. Prices for the new season are not up. Last year Christmas Day at the Grill ran to 495 pounds a head and the St George's Room buffet to 310, which is the right order of magnitude to budget against while you wait.
Affiliation · Oetker Collection Pearl Partner
Three
Twelve hundred square metres of garden, in the eighth arrondissement, behind a door on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. That is the argument for this hotel, and it is an expensive one, because on that street the ground is worth more than most things that could be built on it.
Arabella Lennox-Boyd did the planting, formal and cottage at the same time, topiary and clipped hedge and climbing rose. In December it fills with lit trees. The hotel has done this in 2017, in 2022 and again in 2025, which is long enough to call it a tradition rather than a campaign, and it is the reason to come in winter rather than in June.
Hippolyte Jammet opened the hotel in April 1925 in a house that had belonged to Jules de Castellane. In 2011 it became the first in France to be awarded the Palace distinction. Around a hundred and ninety rooms and suites. Epicure has held three Michelin stars since 2009 and 114 Faubourg one since 2013, and both survived the handover in 2024, when Éric Frechon stood down after twenty-five years and Arnaud Faye took the kitchens with all three stars intact. Three Michelin Keys. Nineteenth in the World's 50 Best Hotels in 2025 and nineteenth again in 2026, which is higher than anything else on this list.
Go up to the sixth floor for the pool. Professor Pinnau drew it in the shape of a boat's prow and it reads as a deck rather than a swimming pool, teak and all; he also drew yachts for Onassis and for Niarchos, and it shows. The resident cat is a Sacred Birman called Socrate and has been since 2021. The festive menus for this year are not published. Paris houses of this kind usually release them in November, so ask rather than assume.
Affiliation · Oetker Collection Pearl Partner
Two
Her husband died in 1892 and she ran the hotel for the next thirty-eight years, until she died in one of its rooms in 1930.
Anna Sacher smoked cigars in public, bred French bulldogs, and set up a health insurance fund for her staff at a time when nobody made her. She also kept the chambres séparées in which a good deal of Austro-Hungarian politics was settled off the record. Few hotels are so completely the work of one person, and the place still runs on her terms more than on her husband's.
Eduard Sacher opened it in 1876 on the site of the demolished Theater am Kärntnertor, across from the Opera. His father Franz had made the torte in 1832, and from 1954 the family spent seven years in court defending the word original against Demel, settling out of it in 1963. The Gürtler and Winkler families have held the hotel since 1934. It runs through six townhouses, and the 2006 renovation set a pale aluminium roof over the top of them to hold the spa. A hundred and fifty-two rooms and suites, by Alexandra Winkler with Pierre-Yves Rochon. Three Michelin Keys for the third year running, and forty-second in the World's 50 Best Hotels in 2026, the only hotel in Austria on the list.
Of the five, this is the one whose Christmas you can book today to the euro. Christmas Eve is five courses with a wine pairing at 445 euros, admission between six and half past seven, the room cleared at ten. Christmas Day is four courses at 325. New Year's Eve offers three ways in, all at 585: a first seating at six, a second from half past nine with no fixed end, and a six-course gala that starts at six and runs until it stops. New Year's Day is four courses at 165, drinks not included. Children eat three courses at 59 in the Petit Sacher. The tree goes up in the lobby in early November and two nutcrackers go on the door.
Affiliation · Leading Hotels, Leaders Club
One
Caspar Badrutt did not build it. He bought the Hotel Beau Rivage and turned it into something else, and the Palace opened on 29 July 1896 with Chiodera and Tschudy's towers standing over the lake. The tower that became the emblem of St Moritz burned in 1967 and was put back as it had been.
A hundred and sixty-three rooms, forty-seven of them suites, in a hotel that closes twice a year. The winter runs from 3 December 2026 to 30 March 2027 and nothing happens here in between, which is part of why the place reads as an event rather than an address. Three Michelin Keys. Thirty-sixth in the World's 50 Best Hotels in 2026, the only ski resort on the list and the only hotel in Switzerland, up from fifty-second the year before. Forbes Five-Star every year since 2020.
Chesa Veglia is an Engadine farmhouse of 1658, a few minutes down the hill, and now holds four restaurants and the Polo Bar. King's Social House, which Jason Atherton reopened in 2018, is said to be the oldest nightclub in Switzerland. The chandelier in the bar is the one Billy Fiske used to jump from, before he went to fly Hurricanes and was killed in the Battle of Britain in 1940.
What the hotel has published for this Christmas is practical rather than romantic. Lift passes are included in the rate from 18 December 2026 to 3 January 2027. A dining package is compulsory over the festive period for everyone aged twelve and above. The hotel's own standing line on New Year's Eve, which it has not changed in years, is that the decorations run to close on a million francs and the party is in costume. Menus for the twenty-fourth and the thirty-first are not out. Ask for them, and ask early.
Affiliation · Leading Hotels, Leaders Club
Christmas in a hotel is a programme, not a mood. The good ones publish it, and the best of them publish it early.
Rendezvous Travel Collection
On our list, Badrutt's Palace in St Moritz, for snow, a frozen lake and a hotel that exists only in season. If you want the Christmas you can book to the euro today, Hotel Sacher Wien has published every festive menu and price for 2026 and 2027. If you want the strongest hotel in its own right, Le Bristol Paris stood nineteenth in the World's 50 Best Hotels in both 2025 and 2026.
Three of the five. Hotel Sacher Wien and Hotel Adlon Kempinski have published full menus, times and prices. The Lanesborough has published its season, 5 November 2026 to 6 January 2027, and named its events but not yet priced them. Le Bristol Paris has published nothing for this season, and Badrutt's Palace has published only its season dates, its lift-pass window and the fact that a dining package is compulsory over Christmas.
Usually yes, and at these hotels the dining sells out before the rooms do. Sacher and the Adlon take festive restaurant bookings independently of any stay. Badrutt's goes the other way and makes a dining package compulsory for every guest aged twelve and over across the festive period, so the meals are inside the booking whether you want them or not.
Yes. Rates over Christmas and New Year are usually non-refundable and carry minimum stays, but the programme benefits sit on top of the rate rather than inside it, so breakfast, a property credit where the programme includes one, upgrade priority and check-in consideration all still apply. Badrutt's and Sacher come through Leaders Club, Le Bristol and The Lanesborough through Oetker Collection Pearl Partner, and the Adlon through Kempinski Club 1897.
Tell us what you have in mind, and we will arrange it with the standing of a preferred partner.