Tatler Best India 2026: Indian Hospitality Finally Gets Its Awards, and Jaipur Cleans Up

India lacked a definitive hotel ranking backed by an international title. The inaugural edition of Tatler Best India, unveiled in Udaipur, fills this gap with a two-tier format. Two Jaipur properties emerge with double honors.

What this ranking changes for Indian hospitality

India boasts some of the finest concentrations of converted palaces in the world, yet its addresses previously only appeared intermittently in international rankings, often lost in an “Asia” category dominated by Japan, Thailand, and the Maldives.

A national ranking changes the mechanics of reputation: it creates a readable hierarchy for the Indian clientele itself, whose high-end purchasing power is growing faster than the country’s international clientele. It is this clientele, rather than the Western traveler, that these awards primarily address.

A two-tier awards list and a year of evaluation

The system does not function like a single ranking. It relies on a Tatler Best 20, a selection of twenty establishments per category (hotels, restaurants, bars), followed by Best-in-Class awards given to the highest scorers in specific fields, from design to service.

Nominees are identified throughout the year by a network of scouts, then evaluated by a panel of experts, editors, and critics. The highest scores in each category claim the Best-in-Class: the prize is therefore not a jury’s choice superimposed on the list, but its summit.

Jaipur, big winner of this first edition

The Leela Palace Jaipur · two distinctions

The property enters the Tatler Best 20 of Indian hotels and wins the Best-in-Class for best design hotel. The jury highlighted the connection between Rajasthani craftsmanship and contemporary writing, which is precisely where many converted palaces fail, unable to choose between reconstruction and modernization.

Raffles Jaipur · two distinctions

The address also features in the Tatler Best 20 hotels, and its Writers Bar enters the Tatler Best 20 bars. This double ranking says something about the country’s trajectory: an Indian hotel bar is now judged at the same table as a city bar.

Both properties are located in Jaipur. For the capital of Rajasthan, long treated as a mere stopover between Delhi and Udaipur, this represents a shift in the center of gravity.

A gateway to the regional ranking

Winners of the Tatler Best 20 and Best-in-Class become eligible for the Tatler Best Asia-Pacific. In other words, this national ranking serves as a qualification: it does not close in on itself, but feeds into a regional ranking where Indian hospitality was previously underrepresented.

Our perspective

A first awards list is valuable primarily for what it establishes: a method, a schedule, a list that can be compared from one year to the next. The full list of winners has not been released in its entirety at the time of writing, and we are only featuring the distinctions confirmed by the establishments themselves here. We will update this article as others are made public.