Choose a format
Why format, not city
A snow hotel in Lapland and a capsule floor above an airport gate have more to say to each other than either has to say to the four-star property down the road.
Both are answers to the same blunt question — what does a room actually have to be — and both arrive at an answer that a conventional listing site has no column for. Sorting hotels by price or destination flattens exactly the properties that were designed around an idea, and it is those properties this index collects.
So there are four categories here and four hotels in each, chosen because the format is doing real work in the building rather than appearing in the marketing. Every entry is written as prose, because the interesting facts about a hotel — how the light falls, where the luggage goes, what the staff quietly handle at three in the morning — do not survive being put in a table.
Numbers that would need a citation to be trustworthy have been left out. You will find no prices, no star ratings, no invented reviews and no booking buttons, and the properties listed have no say in what is written about them.
How to read it
Hotels first
Every property here is described as a hotel — its rooms, its service, its building. Where a hotel carries a gaming floor, that floor is one facility among many and is treated as such.
Described, not rated
There are no scores. A format that suits one traveller completely will suit another not at all, and a single number cannot carry that difference.
Corrections welcome
Hotels change hands, close wings and rebuild themselves. If something here has gone out of date, the contact page is the fastest way to fix it.