About this index

This site began with a small frustration: hotel writing is almost always organised by destination, which is the wrong axis if what you want is a particular kind of building. Someone curious about capsule hotels does not want a guide to Tokyo. Someone who has seen photographs of an ice hotel wants to know how the sleeping actually works, and whether the one in Romania is different from the one in Bavaria.

So the index is sorted by kind. Four categories — art hotels, capsule hotels, casino hotels and ice hotels — with four hotels in each. The properties sit across several continents and there is no home market: this is an international reference, not a national guide with a few foreign entries appended.

How entries are written

Every write-up is prose. We do not use specification tables, key/value grids, star ratings or scores, and we do not publish guest reviews, invented or otherwise. What we try to give you instead is the character of the place: where it stands, what makes it different from the other three in its category, and what a night there is like.

We keep away from precise numbers. Prices move, room counts change after a refurbishment, and a figure that is wrong is worse than no figure at all. Where a detail is going to affect your booking, the right source is the hotel.

What we are not

We are not a booking agent, a travel agency, or a representative of any hotel described here. There is no reservation system on this site and no way to pay us anything. We have no commercial relationship with the sixteen properties in the index, and none of them has approved, reviewed or paid for its entry.

Corrections

Hotels close, rebrand, refurbish and change what they offer. If something here is out of date or simply wrong, we would rather know — the contact page explains how to tell us.