The Best Luxury Hotel Awards published 30 finalists on 7 September.
Ten categories, three names in each, and only Italian five-star and five-star-luxury hotels eligible. Teamwork Hospitality runs the award, now in its third year, under the patronage of Altagamma and Confindustria Alberghi. Mauro Santinato founded it and presides over it. Winners are announced on 22 October at the Principe di Savoia in Milan.
There is no public vote. A jury decides, and hotels put themselves forward.
How a hotel gets on this list
Applications are free and self-submitted, and they closed on 30 June. Around four hundred hotels applied. From those the jury cut to three per category.
That structure is worth understanding before reading the shortlist, because it explains the shape of it. A hotel that does not apply cannot be a finalist, however good it is, so the absence of a famous name means nothing at all. What the list does show is which houses thought they had a case this year and convinced a panel of it.
Best New Opening: the three
The category that reads as a summary of the Italian year.
The Carlton, A Rocco Forte Hotel, Milan. It opened on 19 November 2025 at Via Senato 5, with a second door onto Via della Spiga, which gives it two addresses in the Quadrilatero. Seventy rooms on the hotel’s own count, though Italian trade press has printed 71. Rocco Forte’s tenth Italian property, in a building owned by Reale Immobili. Philip Vergeylen and Paolo Moschino did the interiors under Olga Polizzi. Fulvio Pierangelini is behind Spiga, Salvatore Calabrese behind the bar, and the Irene Forte Spa runs to 280 square metres. Anyone who drank at the Baretto will recognise the address: this is the old Carlton Hotel Baglioni, closed for a rebuild that ran from March 2022 to October 2025.
Castel Badia, at San Lorenzo di Sebato near Brunico in the Val Pusteria. It opened in December 2025 with 29 keys after a restoration of more than 30 million euro across three years. The Gasser and Knotig families own it. Egnazia Ospitalita Italiana, the Melpignano operation behind Borgo Egnazia, runs it with the Kronplatz group, and it has gone straight into The Leading Hotels of the World. The building was a fortress founded around the year 1000 and became the first Benedictine convent in Tyrol in 1020, a women’s house that ran for seven centuries until Joseph II suppressed it in 1785. The spa is built into the old monastic cells. Stube Badia, on the ground floor, is directed by Alberto Toe, who was creative director at Norbert Niederkofler’s Horto in Milan.
Airelles Palladio Venice, on the Giudecca, five minutes by boat from San Marco. It opened on 1 April 2026 with 45 keys, 17 rooms and 28 suites, plus a three-bedroom villa called the Conventino with its own pool and garden. This is the first Airelles house outside France, after Courchevel, Gordes and Le Grand Controle at Versailles. Christophe Tollemer did the interiors across three sixteenth-century buildings and nearly a hectare of garden, on the site of the Zitelle complex. Four chefs cook there: Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Nobu Matsuhisa, Norbert Niederkofler and Cedric Grolet. The spa runs to 1,700 square metres.
Aman Rosa Alpina at San Cassiano took this category last year.
The other nine categories
Best Service: Bellevue Syrene in Sorrento, Four Seasons Firenze, Corinthia Rome.
Best Design: Casa Monti in Rome, Castel Badia, and Villa San Michele in Florence.
Best Wellness and Spa: Hotel de Russie in Rome, Lefay Lago di Garda at Gargnano, Castelfalfi at Montaione.
Best Sustainability Program: Casa di Langa at Cerreto di Langa, Il Borro at San Giustino Valdarno, Borgo Egnazia at Savelletri di Fasano.
Best Restaurant: Atto at Palazzo Portinari Salviati in Florence, Bluh Furore at the Furore Grand Hotel, and Otto Geleng at the Grand Hotel Timeo in Taormina.
Best General Manager is the only category for people: Alessandra Pagano, of the Westin Palace in Milan and the St Regis in Venice; Giuseppe De Martino of the St Regis Rome; Diego Roggero of Portrait Milano.
Best Breakfast: Grand Hotel Tremezzo on Lake Como, Borgo Santandrea at Amalfi, L’Albereta at Erbusco.
Best Wine Selection: Hotel La Perla at Corvara, Hassler Rome, Park Hyatt Milano.
Best Bar: Principe di Savoia, Hotel Locarno in Rome, Portrait Milano.
Three things the list tells you
Castel Badia is the only hotel in two categories, Design and New Opening, four months after opening. A thousand-year-old convent turning up as a design finalist in its first winter is the kind of result restorations rarely get.
One group appears twice under different names. Egnazia Ospitalita Italiana operates Castel Badia and owns Borgo Egnazia, which is a sustainability finalist. The Melpignano family has been quietly building a group that can be judged in Puglia and the Alps in the same week.
Portrait Milano is on the list twice as well, for its bar and for Diego Roggero, and it meets the Principe di Savoia in the bar category while the Principe hosts the ceremony. Rome takes six of the thirty places. Milan takes five, or six counting Alessandra Pagano, who runs a hotel in each city.
What to do with it
Awards decided by a jury from written applications tell you what a hotel is proud of, not what a stay feels like in February. Read this one as a shortlist of Italian houses worth checking rates on, not as a verdict.
The three new openings are the useful part. All three are inside their first year, which is when a hotel is either still finding its feet or already sure of itself, and that difference is easy to feel and impossible to book around.
Luxury.it perspective
The Carlton, Castel Badia and Airelles Palladio are not competing for the same guest, and a single category pretending otherwise is the limit of the format.
One is a city hotel with two doors onto the Quadrilatero. One is a thousand-year-old convent in the Val Pusteria with 29 keys and a spa in the cells. One is a garden on the Giudecca with four famous kitchens in it. Pick by the trip, and let the jury argue in October.
If you want the one that will be hardest to book by next summer, it is Castel Badia. Twenty-nine keys and two nominations in its first winter is a small number meeting a large amount of attention.
Related guides
Our openings section follows all three, and our guides to Milan and the Dolomites cover the ground around two of them.
For rates, suite categories and reservations at any hotel on the shortlist, contact Luxury.it Concierge.
