The Best Places in the United States

A Bavarian facade that the 1960s built and nobody has had the heart to remove, and inside, a boutique adventure hotel where the blond wood and cruiser bikes for loan make considerably more sense than the lederhosen outside. The bar pours beer and cocktails, breakfast runs until you're ready to move, and the whole operation sits an easy walk from both the main drag and the riverside park skiers, climbers, and cyclists treat as a second living room.

Drive-up parking survives at this revamped motor lodge on the highway out of Boone, which a Raleigh hospitality group turned from a classic family motel into a boutique hotel without erasing the old bones. Rooms are cozy and freshened with custom furnishings and local artwork; upper-level ones have balconies, and many look out toward the Blue Ridge. A courtyard fire pit ringed with rocking chairs handles the evenings, and an on-site eatery covers comfort food.

SCP stands for "soul, community, planet," which tells you this isn't a regular chain hotel before you've even unpacked. It's a boutique stay on Banyan Drive with a sustainability-first ethos, minimalist rooms that don't feel punishing, a fitness studio, and a small market stocked with local coffee and provisions. The staff will help you map out the Big Island without making you feel like a tourist, which, to be fair, you are.

Five cabins on a bluff above Kachemak Bay, each named for a local creature and built to match its personality: the Wolf's Den goes underground, the Puffin leans yurt, and the Eagle's Nest stays reassuringly cabin-shaped. This small collection of rentals comes with kitchenettes, BBQs, and views that do most of the decorating. A shared hot tub sits on the property for when the scenery stops being enough. The Michelin Guide has selected it among its hotels.

The Golden Gate Saloon has been pouring drinks long enough that the bar itself is basically a local landmark. The Holbrooke is a historic hotel in the Sierra Nevada foothills, with rooms split between the original building and a carriage house, both dressed in period character without skimping on the modern amenities. A speakeasy-style cellar lounge called the Iron Door sits downstairs for anyone who prefers their atmosphere subterranean.

A Finger Lakes resort on Canandaigua Lake where the traditional clapboard exterior opens into rooms done in pale wood and white linen, the kind of Scandinavian calm that makes you feel like you've already had a nap. There's a lakefront pool, a full spa, and the region's vineyards close enough to fill an afternoon. Winter draws skiers; summer draws everyone else. The Michelin Guide has it among its selected hotels.

The tree houses sleep adults, which tells you something about the ambition here. This sprawling mountain resort sits on its own 12,000-acre estate in the Blue Ridge, with rooms in the main lodge, chalet-style suites, and those treetop cabins perched above the Dan River Gorge. It's the kind of place where "stepping outside" means something wilder than a hotel courtyard, and guests tend to stay lost in the woods for days.

The grand Victorian facade has been standing on Broad Street since the Gold Rush, and the boutique hotel inside it now looks nothing like a place that survived the 1800s, in a good way. Rooms lean retro-styled rather than dusty-museum, the National Bar pours craft cocktails, and Lola does European-accented California cooking. Nevada City itself is equal parts hiking trails and bohemian charm, so guests tend to arrive muddy and leave well-fed.

Ten rooms in the Poconos, which the owners call a "micro-hotel" with a straight face. What it is, more plainly, is a small boutique hotel that bets on the Poconos having a moment the way the Catskills have been having theirs for a while now. City comforts land in the middle of good northeastern Pennsylvania woods, near Promised Land State Park, for the East Coast urbanite who wants nature with decent bedding.

Safari tents on 100 acres of Maine waterfront, which is either an absurd concept or a perfect one depending on how you feel about glamping. Under Canvas plants its luxury tented camp just outside Acadia National Park, outfitting each unit with a king bed, wood-burning stove, private deck, and a proper en-suite bathroom so you never have to locate a flashlight at 2am. The Stargazer tents add sky-viewing windows for anyone who prefers their ceiling seasonal.

Glamping tents pitched 25 minutes from the South Rim, close enough to feel the pull of one of the planet's great holes in the ground without actually sleeping in it. Under Canvas Grand Canyon is a luxury camping resort where the surroundings do most of the decorating. Hiking, biking, and rafting fill the days, and if the canyon floor is calling, guided mule rides go all the way down, which sounds romantic until you're on the mule.

A glamping resort on 86 acres at the foot of the Presidential Range, where some tents have windows cut above the bed so you can watch the stars without leaving your sleeping bag. The experience across all the tents is deliberately low-tech: no wi-fi, just trails, rivers, and s'mores. Yoga classes and guided access to the surrounding White Mountains fill the days. Selected by the Michelin Guide.

A 17-story resort wrapped around an Art Deco original from the late 1930s, Loews Miami Beach spreads across Collins Avenue with nearly 800 rooms, multiple restaurants, and a pool that earns its keep in a city full of them. An Exhale Spa outpost handles the recovery side. It skews family and large groups, though the sheer scale means everyone turns up eventually, which is either a feature or a warning depending on your travel style.

Porches facing Taylor Creek set the tone at this waterfront hotel in old Beaufort, where the marsh sits close enough to remind you you're on the Carolina coast. Rooms lean into the nautical without going overboard, shiplap walls and rigging-line details keeping things grounded. The Michelin Guide has it among its selected hotels. Live music on weekends pulls in locals alongside guests, which is usually a good sign about a place.

Named for a granite wall it sits about 80 miles from, this boutique hotel in downtown Merced splits its personality evenly between base camp and city stay. Yosemite is the obvious draw, but Merced is the last real town before the park swallows you whole, and the hotel leans into both sides of that equation. Practical for adventurers, comfortable enough for anyone who just wants a stylish room on the Central Valley rather than a tent.

A portrait of Magic Johnson made entirely from shoelaces greets you at the front desk, which tells you everything you need to know about this hotel. Graduate East Lansing sits just across from the Michigan State campus, and it leans hard into that fact, from emerald green everywhere to MSU initials in the carpets to basketball wallpaper in the bathrooms. Subtlety was never the brief, and the Spartans faithful wouldn't have it any other way.

One suite here is named for Tom Clark, a Civil War outlaw buried under Tennessee Street just to spite anyone who said they'd walk over him. GunRunner is a ten-suite boutique hotel in downtown Florence, with balconied rooms overlooking the city, walk-in showers, and a bar inlaid with honeycomb onyx downstairs. The Shoals' music and fashion history get their due too, but Clark steals the lobby conversation every time.

The painted beams and arched windows of a 1920s Moorish Revival temple still run the show here, even with chandeliers and patterned textiles layered on top. Hotel 1928 is a 33-room boutique hotel on Washington Avenue with a café, two restaurants, a library, and sitting rooms that reward wandering. Ten minutes from the Silos, it draws the kind of guests who appreciate a building with a past and a decent place to sit in it.

A 24-acre resort on a stretch of the Keys most people blow past on the way to Key West, Isla Bella sits near the east end of the Seven Mile Bridge with five pools, a sandy beach, and nearly 200 suites. It's a self-contained luxury resort, the kind where you could theoretically never leave the property, which for some people is a vacation and for others is a warning.

A Marriott on the Ithaca Commons, close enough to Cornell that parents' weekend fills the lobby fast. Rooms run a pacific blue and white palette with waterfall showers, and the higher floors catch Ithaca's tree canopy at its best. The hotel's own Monks on the Commons handles in-room dining, and the weekly calendar keeps things lively with tastings, trivia, and board-game nights, which is either charming or a lot, depending on your Friday mood.

A converted mid-century motel done up in faded Seventies palette, LOGE Westport is a boutique adventure hotel for people who drove two and a half hours from Seattle specifically to get wet. The Sands Cafe handles third-wave coffee and breakfast; a covered outdoor kitchen with a community grill handles the rest. There's a gear shop stocked for surf outings at Westport State Beach, and the rooms are comfortable without fussing over it.

A drive-in cinema where the hotel loans you a mid-century classic to park in front of it sets the tone at this outdoor resort on the edge of Grand Staircase-Escalante. Compact cabins and vintage Airstream trailers sit across 22 acres, with a swimming pool and bathhouse rounding out the setup. The central lodge has a lounge and general store for when the canyon light fades and everyone needs snacks and somewhere to decompress.

The first major new lodge near Yosemite in living memory sits just outside the park gate on Highway 120, and it reads as a quiet argument that "national park lodging" doesn't have to mean thin walls and sad buffets. Rooms are clean-lined and contemporary without trying too hard, and the villas sit somewhere between hotel suite and vacation home. The spa and restaurant both punch past what you'd expect from the genre.

SCP stands for Soul, Community, Planet, which tells you most of what you need to know about this small, environmentally minded boutique hotel on the Oregon Coast. Six private rooms and a handful of hostel-style bunks keep the scale deliberately human, and a co-working space called SCP Commons means you can pretend your beach trip is actually a workation. Younger, outdoorsy guests who find the typical coastal lodge a bit much tend to gravitate here.

A hotel that has been part of Purdue's campus forever, the Union Club Hotel sits right in the thick of university life without drowning in school-spirit decor, which is a harder needle to thread than it sounds. Rooms feel current, the on-site restaurant leans seasonal with a French tilt, and the whole place carries enough personality that you'd book it even if you had no particular feelings about Boilermaker football.

Glamping at its most self-aware: canvas tents pitched near Bryce Canyon with views of Mount Dutton and Adams Head, so you get the red-rock scenery without the part where you sleep on a root. Under Canvas splits the difference between a hotel and a campsite, leaning hard toward the hotel side, and the formula has spread to national parks across the country fast enough to suggest the compromise is popular. Zion and a handful of other Utah parks are an easy drive.

Glamping with Mount Hood on the horizon: Under Canvas sets safari-style tents across 120 acres of the White Salmon River Valley, an hour from Portland. Each tent comes with a king bed and a private deck, which makes hiking and rafting feel optional rather than mandatory. The indoor-outdoor café runs on regional food, and evenings wind down with live acoustic music and s'mores, which is either charming or a lot, depending on your constitution.

Canvas tents with king beds, wood-burning stoves, and full private bathrooms pitched outside Glacier National Park, open mid-June through mid-September. Under Canvas has rolled out this upscale safari-camp formula at sites across the country, and the formula is honest: hotel-grade comfort dropped into genuine wilderness, no shuttle bus to the experience required. Guests who'd never touch a sleeping bag find themselves actually sleeping outside, which is either the point or the joke, probably both.

Wood-fired hot tubs on the patio set the tone at this 21-cabin hotel near Island Park, Idaho, where Japanese-influenced minimalism does a lot of quiet work. Efficient kitchens, considered artwork, an on-site sauna, and cold-plunge tubs fill out the amenities. Yellowstone is a half-hour drive, but the Henrys Fork River pulls its own weight, with serious rafting and fishing before you even cross the border.

Tucked just off the food court at Mekong Plaza, this Northern Chinese bao shop has outlasted neighbors that came and went while it quietly became a fixture. Handmade dumplings arrive chewy and properly sealed, with steamed buns and xiao long bao filling out the menu. Dan dan noodles and a cucumber salad round things out for anyone who wants something beyond the folded stuff. Phoenix New Times named it the best dumplings in Phoenix.

A steak-and-sushi restaurant inside Scottsdale Fashion Square, which tells you exactly who the room is built for. The menu runs from raw fish and specialty rolls through wagyu and pasta, so you can arrive with shopping bags and leave with a bill to match. The herb-roasted branzino, served over lemon rice, has drawn particular attention from local critics. Not cheap, but the kitchen takes the food more seriously than the setting might suggest.