STORIES

Why We Keep Winning: The Story Behind Our Third Hospitality Award

There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles over a 400-year-old stone hallway at dusk. You can’t manufacture it, and you certainly can’t franchise it. It’s the reason a family will drive three hours out of their way to sleep in a converted monastery instead of a hotel chain off the motorway — and it’s the reason we do what we do.

So when we found out that Historic Hotels of Europe had been named Historic Hospitality Collection of the Year 2026 by the International Explorer Awards in Dublin, our first reaction wasn’t really about us at all. It was about the people who made it possible: the hoteliers who have spent decades — sometimes generations — keeping candle wax out of the upholstery, coaxing modern plumbing through walls that predate plumbing entirely, and somehow making all of that feel effortless to a guest checking in after a long flight.

A Third Time Around

This isn’t our first award, and if we’re honest, that matters to us more than the trophy itself. Back in 2020 and again in 2021, we were named Best Heritage Hotels Collection – Europe at the LUXlife Resorts & Retreats Awards. Winning once can be a nice surprise. Winning a third time, across three different years and two different awards bodies, starts to feel like something else: proof that this way of doing hospitality — slow, careful, a little stubborn — still resonates.

Our chairman, Ken Healy, was delighted to be named Historic Hospitality Collection of the Year 2026:

“This award belongs to the passionate hoteliers and teams across our collection who care for extraordinary properties and keep their stories alive for future generations.”

He’s right, and it’s worth sitting with that for a second. An award like this doesn’t really belong to a logo or a head office. It belongs to the woman who has run the same family-owned manor house since she inherited it from her mother. It belongs to the small team who spent a decade restoring frescoes in a former convent, one careful centimetre at a time. It belongs to every housekeeper, sommelier, and night porter who has quietly decided that a 12th-century castle deserves the same five-star polish as anywhere else — maybe more.

What “Historic Hospitality” Actually Means to Us

We get asked sometimes why we don’t just call ourselves a luxury hotel collection and leave it at that. The honest answer is that “historic” isn’t a decorative word for us — it’s the whole point.

Since we started in 1998, every property that joins Historic Hotels of Europe has to earn its place. We don’t just look at thread counts and spa menus (though those matter too). We look at whether a building has a story worth protecting, whether the people running it treat that story as a responsibility rather than a marketing angle, and whether staying there actually changes how a guest experiences a place — not just where they sleep in it.

That’s why our collection looks the way it does. Take Castello di Gargonza in Tuscany — a walled medieval village turned hotel, where the guest rooms still carry the names of the families who once lived in them, and where Dante is said to have spent part of his exile. Or Hotel Stefanie in Vienna, first recorded as an inn in the year 1600 and still run today by the same family, four generations on — which makes it, by a comfortable margin, the oldest hotel in the city. Or the Dalen Hotel in Norway, a fairytale of dragon-carved wooden towers built in 1894 at the end of the Telemark Canal, which once welcomed European royalty and still feels like stepping into one.

Three countries, three completely different stories, and that’s really the point. Twenty-four countries, and not one property that looks, feels, or behaves like another. If you’ve stayed in more than one Historic Hotels of Europe property, you already know what we mean — the strange, wonderful feeling of realizing you’re not just visiting a historic place, you’re temporarily part of its story.

The Part We Don´t Say Enough

Awards are nice. They’re also, if we’re being candid, a little bit of a proxy for something harder to measure: whether independent, family-run, heritage hotels can still hold their own in an industry that increasingly rewards scale and sameness. Every time a small, independently owned castle-turned-hotel gets recognized on a stage like the International Explorer Awards, it’s a reminder that guests still want the opposite of a template. They want a room that couldn’t exist anywhere else.

So this recognition, as much as it’s about us, is really a vote of confidence in a whole way of running a hotel — one candle-lit hallway, one restored ceiling, one multigenerational family business at a time.

Come See for Yourself

If this is the first you’re hearing of Historic Hotels of Europe: welcome. Every property in the collection is proof that a hotel can be more than a place to sleep. It can be a place with a memory.

Explore the full collection and find the historic hotel that’s been waiting to tell you its story.