17 Years Helping Travelers Find the Best Places to Stay
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Past, Present and Future of bestlocationhotels.com
In 2009, Carles Barceló founded BestLocationHotels.com with a simple goal: to help travelers discover exceptional places to stay around the world.
Seventeen years later, that vision has grown into a platform that has supported millions of travelers in making better booking decisions—through curated recommendations, local insights, and a deep focus on location.
In 2026, Pedro Nunes joined the project, bringing a strong background in technology to help scale the platform for the future. The mission remains the same, but the approach is evolving: more data, more insights, and more high-quality content designed for modern travelers.
At a time when AI tools and large platforms dominate travel discovery, we continue to believe in the value of curated, human-driven recommendations.
Travelers are no longer just typing “hotels in Miami” into Google. They are asking ChatGPT for the best boutique hotel with a rooftop pool. They are using Perplexity to compare options. They are getting answers from Google’s AI Overviews before ever clicking a link.
Hotel Booking Trends and Travel Statistics
Based on more than 20,000 bookings collected between 2018 and 2026, this report provides insights into how travelers choose where to stay.
By analyzing real user behavior, we highlight key hotel booking trends, destination popularity, and patterns shaping global travel decisions.
Most Booked Cities
Some destinations consistently attract more bookings than others. Whether due to the nature of BestLocationHotels, overall popularity, accessibility, or year-round appeal, these cities stand out.
Ubud consistently ranks among the top booked cities worldwide, making up nearly 2% of total bookings. In fact, the top cities combined account for close to 10% of all bookings.
Stays tend to be longer in the United States.
Destinations like Ubud, Sorrento, Paris, and Madrid appear in both charts.
Meanwhile, U.S. cities such as Orlando, Charleston, and Boston tend to have longer average stays.
Given the nature of the website, it’s natural that around 30% of the top cities are in Spain (Madrid and Benidorm) or Spanish-speaking destinations like Cancún.
The charts also highlight popular Asian destinations with intermittent spikes in interest, including Ubud in Indonesia, Hoi An in Vietnam, and Colombo in Sri Lanka.
Overall, these results reveal a mix of global capitals and leisure destinations. Interestingly, secondary cities are gaining traction, suggesting travelers are increasingly exploring beyond traditional hotspots.
Where Travelers Cancel the Most
Booking is one thing—actually staying is another. Cancellation data provides insight into traveler uncertainty, changing plans, or mismatched expectations.
While popular cities see high bookings, cancellations are concentrated in highly volatile or flexible destinations.
Higher cancellation rates often reflect seasonal volatility, pricing fluctuations, or over-optimistic booking behavior. For travelers, this reinforces the importance of flexible booking options when planning trips.
It’s expected that the most booked cities also appear among the top canceled destinations. However, some popular locations like Hoi An, Granada, and Benidorm do not rank among the highest cancellation rates.
Several factors may explain this trend: travelers booking well in advance, strong trust in our recommendations, or limited flexibility due to location constraints, such as properties being far from the booker’s origin, crowded, or with limited availability.
These insights help both travelers and property managers understand patterns in booking behavior and the value of reliable, curated information when choosing where to stay.
Language and Booking Trends
Language plays a key role in how users interact with travel content and complete bookings.
Spanish and English come as no surprise, but some surprises when excluding spanish and english
Due to the nature of bestlocationhotels.com and being written on both spanish and english, it’s not surprising that the top 2 languages are English and Spanish. When excluding English and Spanish, other languages such as Norwegian, Danish, German, and Dutch rank among the top 10. Portuguese is expectable due to the size of Brazil and brazilian destinations such as Florianopolis or Buzios being very popular among brazileans.
Note: The language was normalized so both pt-pt and pt-br count as PT, es-ar / es-ch count as ES, … Note 2: CA is catalan
Understanding these patterns helps us better tailor content and improve user experience across different regions.
Final notes
We’d like to thank all the travelers who support BestLocationHotels by booking through our affiliate links.
By doing so, you help us keep the platform independent—at no extra cost to you—while allowing us to continue creating high-quality, curated travel content.
For 2026 we plan to review all our destinations and update the recomendation list while adding new destinations, all part of our great ideas and great plans for 2026.
Stay tuned, Team Best Location Hotels
