“Five star” is not one thing. In London it is at least three different systems that do not agree with each other, and the disagreement is the useful part.
Here is the fact that makes the point. The Ritz is not a five star hotel by the most demanding of those systems. Neither is The Peninsula, The Lanesborough or Corinthia. A small hotel in Knightsbridge you have probably never heard of is.
Who can actually award a star in the UK
Very few people, and this is worth knowing before you read another listing.
Only five bodies can award a hotel star rating in the UK: the AA, VisitEngland, VisitScotland, Visit Wales and Tourism Northern Ireland. They have worked to a common set of quality standards since 2006, so a four star in Cornwall means the same as a four star in Clerkenwell.
Everything else is marketing. When a booking site calls a hotel five star, that is usually the hotel’s own description, not an assessment. Nobody inspected anything.
The scheme is voluntary, and the best hotels opt out
This is the part that undoes the whole idea. No hotel has to be rated. The AA works with around 2,300 hotels nationally, which is a fraction of the market, and hoteliers drop out regularly. The usual reason given is that guests look at review sites instead, or that the criteria do not fit the way the hotel actually operates.
Whole groups skip it. Firmdale and Soho House avoid formal accreditation entirely, and nobody would argue that makes their hotels worse.
So an unrated London hotel tells you nothing at all. It may not have applied.
One and two stars no longer exist
The AA and VisitEngland overhauled the scheme, and the bottom of it has gone.
There are now three tiers. Visitor Ready is a baseline accreditation. Quality Assessed replaces what used to be one and two stars, and carries no star rating at all: it means the place meets the minimum standards. Quality Star Rated covers three, four and five stars, which survive unchanged.
The AA’s stated reasoning was that there was no longer any consumer need for one and two star ratings. In practice it means a star rating is now a mark of the upper half of the market rather than a scale running across all of it.
Forbes, and the list that surprises people
The other system that matters at this end of the market is the Forbes Travel Guide, which sends anonymous inspectors and rates Five-Star, Four-Star or Recommended. It is harder than the UK scheme and it is where the interesting disagreements show up.
Nineteen London hotels hold a Forbes Five-Star rating for 2026. That list was rechecked against the Forbes Travel Guide’s own London listing on 28 September 2026, filtered to hotels rated Five Star, and it came back at exactly nineteen again, name for name. For scale, the same listing carries 24 London hotels at Four Star, 14 Recommended and 3 awaiting a rating:
- Claridge’s, The Connaught, The Dorchester and The Berkeley
- The Savoy and Rosewood London
- Brown’s and Bvlgari
- Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park and Shangri-La The Shard
- Four Seasons at Park Lane and Four Seasons at Tower Bridge
- Raffles London at The OWO and Pan Pacific London
- The Cadogan, The Goring, Hotel 41, The Egerton House and The Prince Akatoki
The first eleven are the names you would expect. The last five are the interesting ones, and The Egerton House Hotel is the Knightsbridge one mentioned at the top of this page: a small hotel most people have never heard of, holding a rating that The Ritz does not.
Two London hotels that sit just outside it are worth naming, because they show where the line falls. 11 Cadogan Gardens and 45 Park Lane are both rated by Forbes for 2026 and neither is Five Star.
The famous houses that are Four-Star
These London hotels are rated Forbes Four-Star, not Five, for 2026:
The Ritz London. The Peninsula London. The Lanesborough. The Emory. Corinthia London. 45 Park Lane. Hotel Café Royal. The Langham. The Beaumont. The Stafford. The Ned. The Milestone.
DUKES and The Londoner sit a tier below again, at Recommended.
This is not an insult and it should not change your booking. Four-Star from Forbes is a serious rating that most hotels on earth will never hold. What it tells you is that the inspectors found something specific and measurable that the Five-Star houses do better, usually in service consistency rather than in the building.
What it should change is how much weight you give the phrase. The Ritz is one of the great hotels in the world and its afternoon tea is the most famous in London. It is also, on this scale, a four star hotel. Both things are true.
The three you have never heard of
The genuinely useful finding. Three of the nineteen are small hotels with no international profile at all, and they are rated above the grand names.
Hotel 41, on Buckingham Palace Road, is a thirty room townhouse hotel. The Egerton House Hotel is a Knightsbridge townhouse of similar size. The Prince Akatoki is a Japanese hotel near Marble Arch.
All three are small enough that service consistency is achievable in a way it simply is not across two hundred rooms, which is exactly what the Forbes assessment measures hardest. If the rating is what you are buying, the small hotels are the value in London.
The Goring belongs in the same conversation. Family owned, comparatively small, Five-Star, and the only one of the grand London hotels that publishes a dress code clear enough to quote, which our guide to London dress codes does.
So which rating should you trust
For consistency of service, Forbes. It is the hardest of the three and the most specific about what it measures.
For facilities and cleanliness, the UK stars. That is what the AA and VisitEngland scheme actually assesses, and it does it well.
The Michelin Guide now rates hotels too, with Keys rather than stars, on a one to three scale. It is the newest of the systems and weighted toward character and design rather than service standards.
For whether you will enjoy it, none of them. A rating cannot tell you whether a hotel suits you. It can only tell you that somebody checked.
Practical notes
Ignore “5 star” on a booking site. It is self-declared and it is the least reliable use of the phrase in the industry.
An unrated hotel is not a lesser hotel. The scheme is voluntary and some of London’s best simply do not enter it.
Size predicts service more than price does. Every small hotel in the Five-Star list is there on service, and it is the most consistent pattern in the data.
Check the rating year. Ratings are reassessed annually and hotels move between tiers. A guide quoting a Five-Star rating from three years ago is quoting something that may no longer be true.
The ratings above were taken from the awarding bodies’ own published listings and rechecked on 28 September 2026.
Where to stay in London is the page to read before this one, because the neighbourhood decides more here than the star rating does.
Where to go next
The Ned is the members club hotel in the old Midland Bank hall, with a public ground floor.
The best hotels in London is the guide to choosing one, with the institutions, the new arrivals and the weekend rate difference in the City. This page is about what the label means; that one is about where to stay.
For a room for the afternoon rather than the night, day use hotels covers the houses that sell by the hour without any of the awkwardness, and the discreet hotels covers the ones built around privacy.
Boutique hotels in London takes the other half of that list: three of the nineteen Forbes Five-Star houses are small townhouse hotels, the Egerton House, Hotel 41 and the Prince Akatoki, and they outrank the Ritz and the Peninsula on the same scale.
Questions we get asked
Are London five star hotels officially rated?
Usually not in the way people assume. When a booking site calls a hotel five star, that is generally the hotel’s own description rather than an independent assessment. In practice a star rating now marks the upper half of the market rather than sitting on a scale running across all of it, so treat the number as a category and not a measurement.
Should you trust a five star rating when booking a London hotel?
Not on its own. Ignore the five star label on a booking site and judge the hotel on what it publishes about itself: the rooms, the location, the check in and check out times and the policies. This is not an insult to the hotels concerned and it should not change your booking, but it should change what you rely on when comparing two of them.
What actually distinguishes a top London hotel?
The things that are published rather than the ones that are claimed. Check in and check out times, luggage storage, early arrival policies and what is included vary far more between hotels of the same nominal rating than the star count suggests, and in London the neighbourhood decides more about your stay than the hotel does.
Written by Robert J Wills, no. 40 in the guide.
Last checked 28 September 2026 against the venues' own published information. Nobody pays to appear here and we take no bookings.
