🗝️ Master Key: Hotel People’s Bucket List Hotels

A master list of places I dream about, and what’s on the lists of other Upgrade hotel obsessives

🗝️ Master Key: Hotel People’s Bucket List Hotels

I am a person for whom the hotel is the point.

I have never been a “I barely-spend-any-time-in-the-room” kind of person.

I grew up in a family that owned a hotel company, and I spent much of my childhood hanging out in hotels while I waited for my dad to finish up work in his office, traveling to hotels as I tagged along on sales calls, or staying in hotels for family trips.

After 18 years in the luxury travel industry, first running the experiential travel programs for Exclusive Resorts and Inspirato, and now as a luxury travel agency owner at Alpenglow Travel, I have stayed in some incredible properties around the world.

My husband likes to joke that I have the most expensive job possible, because working in luxury travel means I have built a bucket list of five star hotels a mile long.

I am a planner. I plan my travel two to three years in advance, and I always know what my next big trips will be, both on my own and with our kids.

I divide my bucket list into two types of travel. The first category is experiences I want to have. The second is hotels I want to stay in.

I post hotels worth a stay and room reports on Substack in The Upgrade Weekly and in my map pin posts.

In this week’s Master Key, I am sharing the hotels on my bucket list, the ones I would absolutely go back to that belong on your list, and a crowd-sourced list from my subscriber chat of hospitality industry people and fellow hotel obsessives.

If you’d like to book any of these hotels, please reach out to me at AnneMarie@alpenglowtravel.com

Where I haven’t been yet

Africa

Kisawa Sanctuary, Benguerra Island, Mozambique. I specialize in safaris and have been to Botswana five times, along with South Africa, Namibia, Tanzania, Kenya, and Rwanda. I have not made it to Mozambique yet. I like to add a few days of beach time to my clients’ itineraries after a safari so they have time to recover, and this is a spot I send clients often. Kisawa covers 300 hectares in the Bazaruto Archipelago, and the team built the residences using a patented 3D-printing technique alongside island artisans. That is barefoot luxury done right.