The European Openings Worth Planning a Trip Around in 2026
By June, the renders have given way to real rooms — a lobby someone has finally stood in, a kitchen with the burners lit, a courtyard that turned out smaller or stranger than the drawings promised. The openings lists that arrived every January read like inventory: a brand, a room count, a building nobody had entered yet. Now the useful question is which of those places have actually opened, which are close enough to plan around, and which are worth the detour.
What follows is the shorter answer — the European hotels and restaurants of 2026 that reward the trip, weighted toward the cities we already know well.
Milan
A hidden courtyard, a rooftop bar, and two pools — one indoors, one open to the sky — are what most people are waiting on at Six Senses Milan, expected late in 2026 on Via Brera, directly across from the Pinacoteca. It is a small hotel by the brand's standards — sixty-nine keys wrapped around that courtyard. It was meant to arrive in 2025; the delay has only sharpened the anticipation. In a city that guards its courtyards, a hotel built around one feels right.
For dinner, chef Claudio Sadler has moved his Michelin-starred kitchen, Sadler, into Casa Baglioni — the whole operation, not a satellite of it. It is the rare hotel restaurant that locals will cross town for.
Paris
In the cellar dining room of Hotel Salvia, the wine list shares its shelves with a collection of rare books — a very Left Bank idea of luxury, and the detail people keep mentioning. The hotel, which opened in late February in the Latin Quarter, is three small houses stitched into one ninety-nine-room building facing the Sorbonne and the Panthéon. Paris is restoring as much as it builds.
A façade built to echo the house's monogram trunk is the louder story on the Champs-Élysées, where a Louis Vuitton hotel is expected. Treat it as a rumour with planning permission: the filings describe a hotel, restaurant and spa, but the maison has published no firm date, so anyone promising you a room is guessing. Worth watching, not yet worth booking around.
Barcelona
A rooftop pool, a wine bar and a corner of the Eixample near Passeig de Gràcia: Bless Barcelona, Palladium's luxury house, opens there this summer, with a fuller opening planned for autumn. It is a hundred-and-nineteen-room hotel in the classic-meets-contemporary register the city does well, with a main restaurant besides. The appeal is less the design language than the address — this stretch of the Eixample is where Barcelona keeps its appetite.
Vienna
A short walk from Stephansplatz, on Riemergasse, Mandarin Oriental, Vienna began taking guests in November — the city's marquee arrival, landing just ahead of the new year. It is the group's first house in the city, and it slots into a small, serious set of openings that has quietly raised the ceiling on where to stay in the old centre. If you have been waiting for a reason to give Vienna a full weekend rather than a layover, this is a good one.
Venice
A fifteenth-century palazzo in Cannaregio, off the tourist current, reopens as Orient Express Palazzo Donà Giovannelli, welcoming guests from April — the most romantic opening of the year. It is the second hotel in Accor's revival of the Orient Express name, and the restoration — led by Aline Asmar d'Amman — has uncovered original frescoes and Gothic windows rather than papering over them. Forty-seven rooms, a fine-dining room reached by private boat, and a bar that nods to the golden age of rail. It is unapologetically theatrical, which in Venice is the correct register.
Rome
On Via Veneto, the nineteenth-century Hotel Majestic has been handed to the crystal house Baccarat, and Baccarat Hotel Rome — its first hotel in Europe — is expected late in the year, after a restoration backed by serious money. Expect eighty-seven rooms, a terraced restaurant over the avenue, a rooftop bar, and, inevitably, a great many chandeliers. Via Veneto has been waiting decades for its old glamour to mean something again.
Amsterdam
A vegetable-led, share-the-table menu of the kind that made his name: Yotam Ottolenghi has opened his first restaurant in the Netherlands in Amsterdam's Museum Quarter. It sits inside the Conservatorium — long one of the city's best hotels — which in the same season was rebadged as Mandarin Oriental Conservatorium. A destination restaurant attached to a hotel that was already a destination is a rare doubling of reasons to go.
London
London's first hotel magnesium pool sits inside a vast spa at Six Senses London, the wellness brand's UK debut, which arrived in March in the restored Whiteley building on Bayswater's Queensway — and drew the most column inches of any opening this year. It brings a hundred-and-nine rooms and a private members' club besides. It is less a hotel than a small wellness district — and a sign of where the high end of the city is heading.
How to keep the list from going stale
The trouble with an openings list is that it is accurate for about a fortnight. A hotel slips its date, a restaurant finds its feet, a neighbourhood quietly becomes the one to stay in. That drift is exactly the gap Better Taste is built to close: the catalogue for each city is curated and kept current, so instead of saving a post you carry the whole edit in your pocket — filter it by the kind of trip you are taking, and save the places you mean to get to.
Start with the cities above, then browse the rest of Europe.