The Art of British Refinement: A Masterclass in Excellence at Claridge’s
There are hotels that follow trends, and then there is Claridge’s. They call it "the annex to Buckingham Palace," which sounds like marketing until you walk into the black and white checkerboard lobby and understand that the building has been doing this for over a century and has no intention of stopping. It came in at No. 16 on the World’s 50 Best Hotels 2025, which made it the best hotel in the United Kingdom for the second year running.
We spent two nights here in August 2025, and we want to be precise about something up front, because most reviews of this hotel are written by people who did not pay for it. We did. £1,420 a night. What follows is what that money actually buys, and the one booking decision that quietly returned a few hundred pounds of it.
How We Booked It
The Art of Dining rate, direct with the hotel
We booked direct with Claridge’s, on a Maybourne rate called The Art of Dining. A Claridge’s Room, the entry category, for two nights, August 22 to 24, 2025, at £1,420 a night, or £2,840 for the stay. The 20% VAT is already inside that number. A discretionary 5% service charge sits on top of anything you spend on site.
The headline rate is eye-watering and we will not pretend otherwise. But this is not really a room rate. It is a bundle, and the bundle is where it gets interesting:
A £100 daily credit to spend at the restaurants and bars, which is the important part and which we will come back to.
Daily English breakfast for two, served in The Foyer.
A welcome bottle of Billecart-Salmon Le Réserve NV champagne and a Claridge’s Crest Cake in the room on arrival.
Priority reservations at restaurants and bars across the group.
Here is the detail most people miss, and the reason we chose this rate over a cheaper one. The daily credit is not confined to Claridge’s. It is good across the entire Maybourne London portfolio, which means The Connaught, The Berkeley and The Emory as well. It is also cumulative, so two nights of unspent credit becomes £200 you can deploy in a single evening.
We did not want to guess at that, so we emailed reservations before the trip and asked the question directly: can the £100 daily credit be spent at the Connaught Bar, at a different hotel entirely? The answer came back the same day, in writing. Yes, it can. They attached a brochure of eligible outlets in case we wanted to plan around it.
Our take: Ask the question in writing before you arrive. A five minute email turned an abstract line item on a rate sheet into an evening at one of the best bars in the world. If a rate carries a credit, find out exactly how far it stretches, because the answer is usually further than the marketing copy says.
Pre-Arrival
The art of anticipation
The Claridge’s experience begins long before you land. We were three that weekend, because a friend was joining us for her first ever trip to London, and we needed to solve the bed problem. We asked whether a king with a roll-away was possible or whether we would be forced into two twins.
The reply arrived the next morning, unbothered: yes, a king and an extra bed, and could they have the names of the guests. No upsell. No pushing us toward a suite. No twelve message chain. It was the easiest special request process we have been through with a hotel at this level, and it set the tone for everything that followed.
Our take: Email the reservations team directly rather than using the booking form. At this tier, a human reads it, and a human can say yes to things a form cannot.
The Room
We booked the entry category and did not stay in it
We had booked a Claridge’s Room, which is the way into this hotel. What we were given on arrival was considerably more than that, and nobody said a word about it.
The room ran long and unfolded in stages. An entrance foyer first, then a proper sitting area, which is where the roll-away lived and where it fit without making the space feel like a dormitory. Past that, the king bed. Past that, the bathroom and a walk-in closet. Three adults and their luggage disappeared into it without anyone shuffling sideways past anyone else, which is not something we could say about most rooms at this price in London.
The bathroom deserves its own line. Heated floor tiles, a heated towel rack, and a shower with genuinely ferocious water pressure, which is the most underrated luxury in a hundred year old European building and the one thing gold leaf cannot fake.
The champagne and the Crest Cake were waiting when we walked in, alongside a spread of welcome alcohol well beyond the single bottle the rate promised.
Our take: We were quietly moved up, and nobody announced it or asked for anything in return. That is the Claridge’s move. Book the entry room, be pleasant in your correspondence, and let the hotel decide it likes you. The upgrade you have to campaign for is not the same thing.
Breakfast in The Foyer
Where our split table stops being a negotiation
The rate covers English breakfast for two, and there were three of us, so we paid for the third. It felt like the correct trade rather than a nickel and dime, and we would make it again.
Breakfast is served in The Foyer, the room that anchors the whole building. There was a mild wait for a table, which is what happens when a public space is that good looking, but we were seated quickly enough that it never became a grievance. The menu is a la carte and leans continental rather than the full fry-up.
This is where our table splits, as it always does. One of us is vegetarian, one of us eats everything, and breakfast is where a British hotel quietly reveals which of those two guests it was built for.
Claridge’s handled the vegetarian side properly. Not with a shrug and a plate of tomatoes, not with the kitchen treating the request as an inconvenience to be routed around, but with real options served with the same care as everything else on the table. Joy worked the rest of the menu. Neither of us compromised.
Our take: That is a lower bar than it should be in 2025, and a shocking number of hotels at this tariff still trip over it. Claridge’s cleared it without seeming to notice it was there.
Dante at Claridge’s
West Village meets West End
The most interesting thing happening inside the hotel right now is the crossover with Dante, the legendary New York bar. We went for cocktails only, so we cannot tell you about the food, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
The drinks were the point anyway. Creative, precisely made, and carrying that loose downtown Manhattan confidence into a room full of Art Deco formality. A Dante cocktail arriving in a setting this stately is a genuinely funny collision, and it works far better than it has any right to.
We spent the rest of our evenings between the Claridge’s Bar, which hums with a well dressed, people-watching energy, and The Fumoir, a small velvet lined jewellery box of a room behind a discreet door, which is where you go when you want the nightcap to feel like a secret.
The Connaught Bar
On Claridge’s money
This is the part the whole booking was built around.
The Connaught Bar sits permanently near the top of the world’s best bar lists, and it is a short walk from Claridge’s front door. We arrived right at opening, which is our standing advice for any bar of this reputation. You get the room before the crowd does, and you get a bartender who has time for you.
We started with the craft cocktails from the printed menu and, honestly, the first round underwhelmed us. Excellent, precise, and a little safe. So we did the only sensible thing and asked them for the most experimental, most out there drinks they were capable of making.
Everything changed. The second round was phenomenal. Strange, technical, genuinely surprising drinks that earned every bit of the reputation. At a bar this good, the menu is the floor, not the ceiling.
And when the bill came, we gave them a room number at a different hotel. That was it. No explaining, no manager, no producing the email chain we had carefully saved. The charge went straight onto our Claridge’s folio, where the credit was waiting for it.
Our take: Ask the bartender to show off. And understand what the rate bought you: we drank at one of the world’s best bars, at a hotel we were not staying in, and the money had already been spent months earlier.
What It Actually Cost
The number, not the brochure
Most hotel reviews quote the rate and stop there, which is a quiet form of lying, because the rate is never the bill. So here is ours.
Claridge’s charged our card exactly once, for $4,357.58, and that single line covered everything. The two nights, the third breakfast, the 5% discretionary service charge, and the food and drink we ran up beyond the credit. The room rate alone converted to roughly $3,800 that week, so the true cost landed about $500 above the headline number.
We want to be honest about what that $500 is, because it is not the hotel nickel and diming us. It is a real evening of drinking. Three adults ran up a proper bill at the Dante crossover, we comfortably exceeded the credit at The Connaught, and the service charge attached itself to all of it. We drank like people on holiday and the folio noticed.
But look at what is not on our statement: there is no charge from The Connaught at all. Not one line. An evening at one of the best bars in the world never touched our card as a separate transaction, because the whole thing went onto our Claridge’s folio, where the £200 of accumulated credit ate the first chunk of it and the rest quietly joined the room bill.
Our take: The benefit is only real if you spend it. A credit you leave on the table is a discount you declined. The £200 did not make the evening free and we are not going to tell you it did. What it did was take the sting out of a bar tab at a world top ten cocktail bar, and turn a night we would have hesitated over into one we simply had.
The Verdict
Claridge’s manages to be impeccably formal without ever being stiff, which is a harder trick than it looks. The service team never said no to us, not once, and never made us feel we were being indulged for asking. The building respects its history without being a museum, and the Dante partnership is proof it is still willing to take a swing.
Was it expensive? Yes. Was it one of the best stays we have had? Also yes, and we do not say that lightly. But the honest answer to "is it worth it" depends almost entirely on whether you booked it properly. At £1,420 a night for a room and nothing else, it is a beautiful indulgence. At £1,420 a night carrying breakfast, champagne, an upgrade the hotel volunteered, and £200 of credit good at the best bar in Mayfair, it becomes a calculation you can defend.
Book it if: you want a genuine top 20 hotel that is warm rather than starchy, and you will actually use a food and drink credit. Book direct on the Art of Dining rate, email reservations before you arrive, and get the credit’s reach confirmed in writing.
Look elsewhere if: you want a pool, a large spa, or a resort. This is a city hotel that does city hotel things, exceptionally.
Do what we did if you want the icon without the regret: book the entry room, be gracious in your emails, let the upgrade come to you, and spend every pound of the credit at The Connaught.
Planning your own London trip and want help landing the right rate, the right room, or an upgrade like the one we got? That’s exactly what we do!
