About us

We are a small team of travel enthusiasts who like sharing the journey — and who happen to be unreasonably good at finding out what a beautiful hotel really costs.

How it started

With a private spreadsheet, and a suspicion. A handful of hotels we loved, tracked long enough to learn when they were affordable. The suspicion turned out to be right, and it is the whole trick: a wonderful hotel in its shoulder season routinely costs less than an ordinary one at the height of summer. Almost nobody publishes the numbers that show it.

So we kept the spreadsheet, taught a computer to do the dull part of it, and built this.

The team

We are the sort of people who read a hotel’s breakfast hours before its room rates. Who will get up in the dark for a train because the light on a lake does something for twenty minutes that it does not do all day. Who have, more than once, stayed a third night simply because the terrace was too good to leave.

Travel is not a hobby we fit around the rest of it. It is the reason for the rest of it — and this list is just what falls out of doing it often enough to notice patterns.

Felix — started the list, still writes most of the code and takes most of the photographs. A committed remote worker, which means the laptop goes where he goes and a hotel gets judged on things most reviews never mention: whether the wifi holds up at nine in the evening, whether anyone thought about where you would want to be at seven in the morning. A hotel connoisseur in the proper sense of it — the lighting in a lobby, the weight of a door, the difference between staff who are polite and staff who are pleased to see you. The rest of the day goes to sport, which is why the guides know where to run, swim and walk before breakfast. Happiest with an early train, a long lens and a hotel that turned out to cost less than it looked like it should.

Feli — travels, eats, remembers. She probably won’t tell you where to catch the sunrise, but she knows where to have the sundowner when the sun goes down. She spends much of her free time planning trips, finding the best rates and places worth staying in — preferably houses and apartments away from the big cities, with a view, some quiet and culture nearby. She finds local food worth travelling for — hidden gems and places that actually deserve the hype — what is worth seeing and where to find a secluded beach even in high season. Somewhere to switch off or work remotely for a few days. Her test is simple: would you come back? The best places are the ones where the answer is already yes before you have left.

And a few more along the way — friends who send a photograph, a price and a message along the lines of you have to see this. That is how most places join the list, and it is our favourite way for one to arrive.

What we promise you

• We have been there. Every destination guide is written from a stay, not from a press release.
• Real prices, publicly bookable. Same shape every time — two adults, three nights — recorded on a schedule so you can see the whole seasonal range rather than a flattering "from" number.
• Nobody buys a place on the list. The ranking comes out of the data, cheapest first. No hotel has ever paid us to be here or to be described kindly.

Who operates this site

instyletravel.club is published by CAYTECH LTD, a company registered in the Cayman Islands.

Contact

Corrections, questions and complaints all go to the same place: [email protected]. If we have a price wrong, tell us — we would rather fix it than defend it.