Michelin Keys 2026: 482 Gained, 85 Lost Worldwide
The 2026 MICHELIN Key selection added 482 hotels and upgraded 86. It also removed 85 Keys and downgraded 28 — subtractions the announcement did not mention.
MICHELIN's 2026 Key selection is usually described by what it added: 2,832 hotels, close to 500 first-time Keys, ten countries represented for the first time.
Read the full selection against the 2025 list and a second set of numbers appears. 482 hotels gained a Key they did not hold last year and 86 moved up a tier. In the same selection, 85 hotels lost their Key outright and 28 dropped a tier.
The additions were announced. The 113 downward moves were not.
Chart: hotels that gained or lost MICHELIN Key standing in the 2026 selection. Source: MICHELIN Guide 2026 Key selection, released 18 September 2026, compared against the 2025 selection. Every hotel counted here was read from the Guide's own listings; every loss was re-checked on the hotel's own Guide page.
The scoreboard
| Movement | Hotels |
|---|---|
| New Keys awarded | 482 |
| Upgraded a tier | 86 |
| Dropped a tier | 28 |
| Key removed | 85 |
| Key hotels, 2025 → 2026 | 2448 → 2845 |
What gained
| Hotel | Where | 2025 | 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Airelles Palladio, Venezia | Venice | no Key | Three Keys | New Key |
| Soneva Secret | Dhipparufushi Island | no Key | Three Keys | New Key |
| Beau-Rivage Palace | Lausanne | Two Keys | Three Keys | Upgraded |
| Borgo Santandrea | Conca dei Marini | Two Keys | Three Keys | Upgraded |
| Capella Bangkok | Bangkok | Two Keys | Three Keys | Upgraded |
| Château de la Chèvre d'Or | Eze | Two Keys | Three Keys | Upgraded |
| City of Dreams - Morpheus | Cotai | Two Keys | Three Keys | Upgraded |
| Collegio alla Querce, Auberge Collection | Florence | Two Keys | Three Keys | Upgraded |
| Delaire Graff Lodges & Spa | Stellenbosch | Two Keys | Three Keys | Upgraded |
| Desert Rock Resort | Umluj | Two Keys | Three Keys | Upgraded |
| JOALI BEING | Bodufushi Island | Two Keys | Three Keys | Upgraded |
| Kulm Hotel St. Moritz | St. Moritz | Two Keys | Three Keys | Upgraded |
| Le Couvent des Minimes | Mane | Two Keys | Three Keys | Upgraded |
| Mandarin Oriental Qianmen | Dongcheng | Two Keys | Three Keys | Upgraded |
| Nekajui, a Ritz-Carlton Reserve | Guanacaste | Two Keys | Three Keys | Upgraded |
| Saffire Freycinet | Coles Bay | Two Keys | Three Keys | Upgraded |
| Southern Ocean Lodge | Kangaroo Island | Two Keys | Three Keys | Upgraded |
| Splendido, A Belmond Hotel, Portofino | Portofino | Two Keys | Three Keys | Upgraded |
What lost ground
| Hotel | Where | 2025 | 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beau-Rivage Geneva | Geneva | Three Keys | Two Keys | Dropped a tier |
| Bvlgari Hotel London | London | Three Keys | Two Keys | Dropped a tier |
| Four Seasons Hotel London at Park Lane | London | Three Keys | Two Keys | Dropped a tier |
| Samujana Villas | Surat Thani | Three Keys | Two Keys | Dropped a tier |
| Covent Garden Hotel, Firmdale Hotels | London | Two Keys | One Key | Dropped a tier |
| Domaine de Biar | Montpellier | Two Keys | One Key | Dropped a tier |
| Domaine de Fontenille | Lauris | Two Keys | One Key | Dropped a tier |
| Esperanza, Auberge Collection | Cabo San Lucas | Two Keys | One Key | Dropped a tier |
| Esplanade Saarbrücken | Saarbrücken | Two Keys | One Key | Dropped a tier |
| Excelsior Hotel Ernst | Cologne | Two Keys | One Key | Dropped a tier |
| Four Seasons Resort Palm Beach | Palm Beach | Two Keys | One Key | Dropped a tier |
| Hotel Engel Obertal - Wellness & Genuss Resort | Baiersbronn | Two Keys | One Key | Dropped a tier |
| Hotel Ketschauer Hof | Deidesheim | Two Keys | One Key | Dropped a tier |
| Hotel Villa Honegg | Burgenstock | Two Keys | One Key | Dropped a tier |
| Inn at Thorn Hill | Jackson | Two Keys | One Key | Dropped a tier |
| J.K. Place Roma | Rome | Two Keys | One Key | Dropped a tier |
| Mayfair House Hotel & Garden | Miami | Two Keys | One Key | Dropped a tier |
| Montage Palmetto Bluff | Bluffton | Two Keys | One Key | Dropped a tier |
| Palace Elisabeth Hvar Hotel | Hvar | Two Keys | One Key | Dropped a tier |
| Pendry Chicago | Chicago | Two Keys | One Key | Dropped a tier |
| Pendry West Hollywood | West Hollywood | Two Keys | One Key | Dropped a tier |
| Roomers Berlin Steinplatz, Autograph Collection | Berlin | Two Keys | One Key | Dropped a tier |
| SALA Samui Choengmon Beach Resort | Surat Thani | Two Keys | One Key | Dropped a tier |
| Seezeitlodge Hotel & Spa | Gonnesweiler | Two Keys | One Key | Dropped a tier |
| Six Senses Zil Pasyon | Felicite | Two Keys | One Key | Dropped a tier |
| The Okura Prestige Bangkok | Bangkok | Two Keys | One Key | Dropped a tier |
| The Peninsula Bangkok | Bangkok | Two Keys | One Key | Dropped a tier |
| The Whitney Hotel Boston | Boston | Two Keys | One Key | Dropped a tier |
| Casa Chablé | Tulum | Two Keys | no Key | Key removed |
| Casa Silencio | San Pablo Villa de Mitla | Two Keys | no Key | Key removed |
| Castle Hill Inn | Newport | Two Keys | no Key | Key removed |
| Hotel de Rome | Berlin | Two Keys | no Key | Key removed |
| Le Château de Beaulieu | Busnes | Two Keys | no Key | Key removed |
| Nine Orchard | New York City | Two Keys | no Key | Key removed |
| Tschuggen Grand Hotel | Arosa | Two Keys | no Key | Key removed |
Churn is running at about one hotel in five
Set the movement against the size of the list and the rate is substantial. Against a 2025 base of
roughly 2,450 Key hotels, 113 downward moves is a little over four percent of the list losing
ground in a single year, while a further 568 hotels gained ground.
| Direction | Hotels |
|---|---|
| Gained a Key they did not hold | 482 |
| Moved up a tier | 86 |
| Dropped a tier | 28 |
| Key removed entirely | 85 |
| Total hotels that moved | 681 |
A Key is therefore not a permanent credential. On these numbers a hotel that held one in 2025 had
roughly a one-in-twenty-nine chance of losing it within twelve months, before accounting for
downgrades.
Losing a Key and leaving the Guide are different things
Most removals keep the hotel in MICHELIN's selection. The property is still listed, still
bookable through the Guide, and simply no longer carries a Key — the outcome for Mandarin Oriental
Boston, Ace Hotel Brooklyn, Ace Hotel Sydney, Hotel Le Germain Montreal and dozens of others.
A smaller group leaves the selection altogether, its Guide page taken down. Nine Orchard in New
York, which held Two Keys in 2025, is in that group. So are Le Château de Beaulieu in France and
Casa Chablé in Mexico, both former Two-Key hotels.
The distinction matters when reading any Key list: a hotel absent from this year's selection may
have been demoted, or may simply no longer be in the book.
The top tier is where scarcity is being enforced
Three-Key hotels rose from 143 to 155 — twelve net, against 375 net additions across the list as a
whole. Eighteen hotels were newly awarded Three Keys. Four lost that rank, and all four were checked
against their own MICHELIN page: Beau-Rivage Geneva, Bvlgari Hotel London, Four Seasons
Hotel London at Park Lane and Samujana Villas in Thailand each dropped from Three Keys to
Two. London lost two of its Three-Key hotels in a single selection.
The result is that the top of the list is getting relatively harder to reach even as the list
itself widens. Three-Key hotels were 5.82 percent of all Key hotels in 2025 and are 5.47 percent
now.
MICHELIN also named four special award winners on the same day, published in full here:
Desert Rock Resort in Saudi Arabia for architecture and design, Schloss Elmau in Bavaria for
wellness, Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa as local gateway, and Airelles Palladio Venice as
opening of the year.
How these numbers were checked
Every hotel named above was read from the MICHELIN Guide's own country listings, where each
property carries an explicit One-, Two- or Three-Key marking, and the totals reconcile to the
counts the Guide published on 18 September 2026.
Losses were then checked a second time, one hotel at a time, against that property's own page on
the Guide. That second pass matters: a hotel missing from a country listing has not necessarily
lost anything, because several properties that plainly still hold Keys never appear in those
listings at all. Only a hotel that the Guide still lists, without a Key, has actually lost one.
Every removal and downgrade in this article cleared both checks.
One property in this round did something different again: where a hotel's Guide page has been
taken down entirely, it has left the selection rather than merely lost its Key, and that is stated
as such rather than counted as a downgrade.
What a MICHELIN Key is
MICHELIN introduced the Key in 2024 as the hotel counterpart to its restaurant Star. Inspectors
assess architecture, interior design, service, character, consistency and value across a selection
of more than 9,000 hotels in over 100 countries, and award One, Two or Three Keys: a very special
stay, an exceptional one, an extraordinary one. Nightly rate is not a criterion, which is why a
four-cottage property and a 500-room resort can hold the same distinction.
The 2026 selection, the second, named 2,832 Key hotels worldwide — 155 with Three Keys, 657 with
Two and 2,020 with One — against 2,457 a year earlier. The criteria are set out in
the Guide's explainer on the Key, and the full country-by-country list is
published here.
Author
2026/09/19
