These were the great hotels. The kind of travel your grandparents dressed up for. Most of them are still standing. Some of them have barely changed. You owe it to yourself to stay in at least one before you decide you’ve seen enough of this country.
The hotel at #1 on this list has hosted 26 presidents and contains a secret Cold War bunker the size of a small town hidden beneath its grounds. You’ve seen photos of it. You haven’t understood it yet.
Here are 25 historic American hotels still worth every extra dollar in 2026.
25. The Menger Hotel, San Antonio, Texas
Theodore Roosevelt recruited his Rough Riders in the bar downstairs. You can still sit there and order a drink. The Menger Hotel opened in 1859, making it one of the oldest continuously operating hotels in Texas.
Rooms start around $180/night. The history per dollar here is almost unfair. The courtyard alone is worth a stop even if you’re not staying.
24. The Driskill, Austin, Texas
Lyndon B. Johnson proposed to Lady Bird on the phone from this hotel. It opened in 1886 and immediately became the social center of Texas. You walk through the door and feel the weight of everything that has happened inside these walls.
Rates run $250-$400/night depending on the season. The Romanesque architecture hasn’t changed. Neither has the bar’s reputation.
23. The Pfister Hotel, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
It opened in 1893 and is home to one of the largest collections of Victorian art of any hotel in the world. You don’t expect Milwaukee to hold something like this. That’s exactly why it’s on this list.
Rooms start around $200/night. The lobby alone takes a full 20 minutes to absorb properly. Every visiting Major League Baseball team stays here when they play the Brewers.
22. The Omni Parker House, Boston, Massachusetts
Boston cream pie was invented here. Ho Chi Minh once worked here as a baker. Malcolm X worked as a busboy. The Omni Parker House opened in 1855, making it the longest continuously operating hotel in America.
You can stay here from around $250/night. Every corner has a story nobody tells you before you arrive.
21. Hotel Monteleone, New Orleans, Louisiana
The carousel bar rotates. Slowly. One full revolution every 15 minutes, and you barely notice until your drink is facing a different wall. The Hotel Monteleone opened in 1886 and Truman Capote, William Faulkner, and Tennessee Williams all wrote about it.
Rates start around $200/night. The rotating bar is not a gimmick. It’s an institution.
20. The Adolphus Hotel, Dallas, Texas
Anheuser-Busch built it in 1912 and called it the finest hotel in the Southwest. Queen Elizabeth II stayed here. You walk through the Beaux-Arts entrance and understand immediately why they thought that.
Rooms run $250-$350/night. The French Room restaurant is still one of the most formally beautiful dining rooms in Texas, with a ceiling that looks like it was relocated from a European palace.
19. The Roosevelt Hotel, New Orleans, Louisiana
Huey Long held court in the lobby. The Sazerac Bar is where the Sazerac cocktail became famous nationally. The Roosevelt opened in 1893 and the blue-carpeted lobby is one of the longest and most theatrical hotel entrances in America.
Rates start around $220/night. You don’t just check in here. You arrive.
18. The Brown Hotel, Louisville, Kentucky
The Hot Brown sandwich was invented here in 1926. Open-faced turkey with Mornay sauce and bacon, and it doesn’t sound like much until you have one in the room it was created. The Brown Hotel opened in 1923 and the English Renaissance lobby looks almost exactly as it did then.
Rooms start at $200/night. The Derby is nearby and this is where the serious Louisville travelers have always stayed.
17. The Omni Shoreham, Washington DC
Every president since FDR has held inaugural celebrations here. Not most of them. Every single one. The Omni Shoreham opened in 1930 and the Rock Creek Park setting makes it feel removed from the city even though you’re right inside it.
Rates run $250-$400/night. The history per dollar ratio is extraordinary, even by Washington DC standards.
16. The Peabody Memphis, Tennessee
Every morning at 11am, ducks ride the elevator down from the rooftop Duck Palace, walk a red carpet through the marble lobby to the fountain in the center, and spend the day swimming. This has been happening since 1933. The Peabody opened in 1869.
Rooms start at $250/night. William Faulkner called this hotel “the social center of the Delta.” He wasn’t being poetic. He meant it literally.
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15. Hotel del Coronado, San Diego, California
L. Frank Baum wrote parts of The Wizard of Oz here. Marilyn Monroe filmed Some Like It Hot on the beach out front. The Hotel del Coronado opened in 1888 and the red-turreted Victorian silhouette against the Pacific is one of the most recognizable hotel images in American history.
Ocean-view rooms start around $400/night. Some say the hotel is haunted by a guest who died here in 1892. She’s been here longer than most of the staff.
14. The Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Illinois
The brownie was invented here in 1893, commissioned by Bertha Palmer for the World’s Columbian Exposition. The lobby ceiling is painted with frescoes by French artists and takes most first-time visitors several minutes of standing still to fully absorb. The Palmer House has been on this site since 1871, rebuilt after the Great Chicago Fire.
Rooms start around $200/night. Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland both played the Empire Room. You’ll feel the echoes.
13. The Broadmoor, Colorado Springs, Colorado
It has been Forbes five-star rated for 63 consecutive years. That’s not a run. That’s a record no other American hotel comes close to matching. The Broadmoor opened in 1918 and sits at the base of Cheyenne Mountain with a lake out front and the Rockies as the permanent backdrop.
Rates start around $350/night. Presidents, world leaders, and anyone who takes travel seriously has stayed here. This is where American luxury hospitality was quietly defined for most of the 20th century.
12. The Willard InterContinental, Washington DC
The word “lobbying” entered the American political vocabulary because of this building. Ulysses S. Grant used to sit in the lobby after dinner and men with political requests would approach him there. The Willard has been a hotel on this site since 1818, two blocks from the White House.
Rooms start around $350/night. Martin Luther King Jr. finished writing “I Have a Dream” in a room here the night before the March on Washington. That detail never leaves you.
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11. The Biltmore Hotel, Coral Gables, Florida
The pool was once the largest in the world. Johnny Weissmuller, who played Tarzan, taught swimming lessons here. Al Capone had a suite on the 13th floor and ran his South Florida operations from it during Prohibition. The Biltmore opened in 1926, served as a military hospital during WWII, and was eventually restored to its original grandeur.
Rooms start at $350/night. The sheer scale of the place takes your breath away even if you’ve seen photos. The 26-story tower is still the tallest building in Coral Gables.
10. The Ahwahnee, Yosemite National Park, California
It opened in 1927 and was built to make wealthy travelers comfortable enough to care about protecting Yosemite. That strategy worked. The Ahwahnee is a National Historic Landmark, built from granite and concrete so it looks like it grew from the valley floor rather than being placed on top of it.
Rooms start around $600/night and book out months in advance. The Great Lounge has a 34-foot ceiling. You’ll understand why every dollar is justified the moment you look up.
9. The Beverly Hills Hotel, Beverly Hills, California
Marilyn Monroe lived in Bungalow 1. John Lennon and Yoko Ono checked in for part of their honeymoon. The Beverly Hills Hotel opened in 1912, a full decade before Beverly Hills was incorporated as a city. The pink stucco and banana leaf wallpaper are so iconic they’ve become their own category of Americana.
Rooms start around $700/night. The Polo Lounge has been the center of Hollywood deal-making for over a century. You’re not just staying at a hotel. You’re staying inside American pop culture.
8. The Omni Mount Washington Resort, Bretton Woods, New Hampshire
The Bretton Woods Agreement that shaped the entire post-war global financial system was signed here in 1944. The IMF and the World Bank were essentially born in this building. The Mount Washington Resort opened in 1902 and the Spanish Renaissance design looks like it was transported from another era entirely.
Rooms run $300-$500/night. The views of Mount Washington change with every hour of daylight. This is not simply a hotel. It’s a piece of world financial history you can sleep inside.
7. The Inn at Biltmore Estate, Asheville, North Carolina
George Vanderbilt built the largest privately owned home in America on 8,000 acres with 35 bedrooms, 43 bathrooms, and a banquet hall that seats 64 people. The Inn on the Biltmore Estate lets you sleep inside that legacy. The main house opened in 1895 and has barely changed.
Rooms start at $500/night. Walking the grounds at dawn, the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance and the vineyards rolling across the estate, is one of the most quietly stunning things you can do in the American South. The people who built this are long gone. The house is exactly as they left it.
6. The Plaza Hotel, New York City, New York
Eloise lived here. The Beatles stayed here in 1964. F. Scott Fitzgerald drank here so often the staff knew his order. The Plaza opened in 1907 and the French chateau silhouette at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Central Park South is one of the most photographed hotel facades in the world.
Rooms start around $900/night. The Palm Court still serves afternoon tea in a setting that makes you understand why New Yorkers used to dress up to go to a hotel for lunch. Some traditions deserve to cost what they cost.
5. The Breakers, Palm Beach, Florida
Henry Flagler built his railroad down the length of Florida and placed this at the very end of it, as the ultimate reward for making it this far. The Breakers opened in 1896 and the current building dates from 1926, modeled after Villa Medici in Rome. The frescoed lobby ceilings were painted by Italian artisans brought over specifically for this project.
Rooms start around $900/night in season. A retired interior designer from Connecticut told me she visits every February and has for thirty years. “I keep thinking I’ll get tired of it,” she said. “I never do.” This is the kind of place that gets better the more you pay attention to it.
4. The Greenbrier, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia
Deep below this resort, sealed behind a blast door, is a bunker the size of a small town, built in secret during the Cold War to house the entire United States Congress in the event of nuclear war. It operated covertly for 30 years before a journalist discovered it in 1992. The bunker is now a museum you can tour.
The Greenbrier dates back to 1778, making it one of the oldest resort destinations in America. The design you see today was created by Dorothy Draper in 1948, bold and colorful and completely confident. Rates start around $400/night. You are sleeping above a piece of the Cold War. That fact alone justifies the room rate.
3. The Brown Palace Hotel, Denver, Colorado
The atrium is nine stories tall. Eight floors of cast-iron balconies rise above you, topped by a stained-glass ceiling that floods the space with gold light in the morning. The Brown Palace opened in 1892 and has never closed for a single night since, not even during the 1918 flu pandemic.
Every president since Teddy Roosevelt has stayed here except two. The Beatles stayed on the eighth floor in 1964 and the screaming crowds outside were loud enough to keep other guests awake. Rooms start around $350/night. A former concierge told me the hotel has its own artesian well, drilled during construction, that still supplies the building’s water today. You’re drinking from the same source as guests in 1892. That detail, more than anything else, is what makes this place irreplaceable.
It’s extraordinary. But nothing compared to what’s waiting at #1.
2. The Biltmore, Los Angeles, California
The Academy Awards were held here for the first 20 years of their existence. JFK was staying here the night he won the Democratic nomination. The Biltmore Los Angeles opened in 1923 and the lobby ceiling, painted in rich Spanish Renaissance colors, is one of the most dramatic interior spaces in America.
Rooms start around $250/night, which is remarkable for what you get. The Gallery Bar is where the Black Dahlia murder victim was last seen alive in 1947. Every surface of this building has something attached to it. You’ll check out feeling like you’ve absorbed a century of Los Angeles in two days.
It’s extraordinary. But nothing compared to what’s waiting at #1.
1. The Willard InterContinental, Washington DC
America’s Most Historic Address
Presidents have slept here. Every single one from Millard Fillmore onward has either stayed or held events at this address. The word “lobbying” entered the American political vocabulary because Ulysses S. Grant used to sit in this lobby after dinner and men with political requests would approach him there. Lincoln stayed here during the days before his first inauguration, under a security threat so serious that he arrived in disguise.
Martin Luther King Jr. finished writing “I Have a Dream” in a room here the night before the March on Washington. That speech. In this building. The draft was in his hands in one of these corridors.
The Willard has been a hotel on this site since 1818, two blocks from the White House, making it part of essentially every chapter of American political history. The current Beaux-Arts building dates from 1901 and has been impeccably maintained. Rooms start around $350/night, which is extraordinary value for what is effectively a front-row seat to two centuries of American history.
A retired history teacher from Maryland told me she brings a different grandchild here every year, one at a time, to sit in the lobby and have afternoon tea. “I tell them what happened in this building,” she said. “They’re quiet for a whole hour. You can’t buy that.” The people who shaped this country walked these floors. The stories are still in the walls.
Now you know why we saved this one for last.
These Rooms Still Remember
Most of these hotels have been standing longer than your grandparents have been alive. They’ve hosted presidents and performers, diplomats and newlyweds, people having the best nights of their lives and people needing somewhere beautiful to grieve. That’s what the great hotels were for. That’s still what they’re for.
Which one surprised you most? Drop it in the comments, especially if you’ve stayed in one we should have ranked higher.
