London's Hotel Café Royal has taken the top spot in The Independent's first-ever Travel Awards, announced on 8 September. More than 17,000 readers voted in the survey, and the five-star hotel on Regent Street came out ahead of every other British property.
It's a fitting winner. The original Café Royal opened in 1865 and became a byword for glamour, with Oscar Wilde and David Bowie among the famous names in its guestbook. The building reopened as the modern Hotel Café Royal in 2012, and today it offers 159 rooms and suites, including six signature suites. Food is a serious draw: the hotel has a two-Michelin-starred restaurant on site, and The Independent's hotels expert Emilee Tombs highlights pastry chef Albert Adrià as one of the world's best. There's also the Akasha Spa, a subterranean space with an 18-metre pool, sauna, two marble Hammams and a gym, plus family facilities the award judges singled out for going above and beyond.
The runner-up could hardly be more different in character. The Blakeney Hotel sits on the quay in Blakeney, Norfolk, around 125 miles north-east of London, overlooking salt marshes within a designated National Landscape. It's family-run, with just 60 individually decorated rooms, a restaurant built on seasonal local produce, and a leisure area with indoor pool, steam room, sauna and a mini gym looking onto a sun terrace. Dogs are welcome too — a rarity among award-winning British hotels and a big plus for anyone holidaying with a four-legged companion.
Together the two winners sketch out a pleasing range: for a big-city splurge with history baked into the walls, Café Royal is the pick; for a quieter coastal break on the north Norfolk coast, Blakeney makes a strong case. Both show that British hotel guests reward character and service as much as thread counts. The awards themselves mark the first year of The Independent's reader-voted celebration of destinations, travel companies and days out, so expect the shortlists to become a useful annual barometer.