Who are we?

The Aficionados have been connecting the dots of creativity since 2009.

A neat, tightly edited collection of our personal favourite, creatively inspired hotels, houses, villas and crafted products that possess a strong style narrative and have a natural warmth about them. Strictly more about the creative thread and crafted interiors than stars or chain operators. They make us smile, they are The Aficionados.
The word does double duty, which is the whole idea. The places are aficionados. So are the people who read about them, the makers, and the crew.

The long way round

We started in 2009 with two questions. How do you drive traffic directly to a property. And if we owned a place like this ourselves, how would we make sure the right traveller walked through the door, and that the place was positioned the way its owner meant it to be?

The answers on offer were OTAs, booking engines and affiliation models, all of which solve the first by charging for it and none of which address the second at all.

So we are a marketing platform, not a booking channel. We take nothing from what you earn, and we have worked that way since 2009, some years before the industry got round to calling it direct booking and charging for the privilege.

What we make of your place

Most of the little places here took years in the planning and a good deal of money. Finding the right architect. Getting the feel right, and the sense of place. Getting the light right in a room that nobody photographs.

Most coverage boils all of that down to twelve rooms, good location, stylish. The spend is visible. The thinking behind it never is.

What we do is read the interiors and read into the architecture, its provenance and its reasoning, and then put the place into a dialogue. Who designed it and what they were after. What was kept and what came out. Why the floor is that material and not the obvious one. We talk to the people who made it rather than rewriting a press pack, and where a maker is involved we credit them by name.

The dialogue runs two ways. If you have used timber in all its connotations, we are likely to put you next to somewhere on a coast that has done the same, and let the two explain each other.

We are writers at heart and visual narrators by habit.
That is how the traffic comes.

"It's so well, I'm not going to use the curated word, it's so well edited. Their approach to who comes into the group is amazing."

TYLER BRÛLÉ, MONOCLE RADIO, JANUARY 2025

The address book

Brucke49-Common-LARGE-Photo-Martin-Kaufmann_DSC9006.jpg

A hundred-odd little places across twenty-four countries, and not a chain among them. We counted. Juvet in Norway. Kinloch Lodge and Killiehuntly in the Highlands. Casa Fortunato in the Alentejo. Susafà out in the Sicilian wheat. Brücke 49 in Vals. The Greenwich in TriBeCa.

And the little places that carry the thread just as clearly. Pensão Agrícola in Tavira, with a donkey named Ernesto. The Church Tower near Crieff. Mezi Plutky in the Beskydy. Hirschen in Schwarzenberg, ten generations and one crooked 1755 inn.

Vincent Van Duysen at August. Gion A. Caminada at Maistra 160. Peter Pichler at Schgaguler. Nina Mair at Colle ai Lecci. Márcio Kogan at L'AND. noa* at Monastero. Ptolemy Dean at Aldourie.

Nobody assembled that list by buying media.

Affirmed fans

A few thousand people who care enormously will do more for a hotel than a few million who do not. We have worked that way since 2009, back when it was simply how we wanted to do things, and the rest of the trade has spent the years since catching up.
Our readers are affirmed fans. They bond with the tone of voice and the visuals, they read the whole thing, and they go looking for the places afterwards. They are not an audience we rented, interrupted or chased. They turned up because this is the sort of thing they like, and they stayed.
Here is the part most people miss: the people who read us and the people we write about are largely the same people. The style leaders. Confident, educated, sophisticated, rooted, aesthetically astute, creative, sometimes earthy, maybe dreamers, worldly and free of the usual cultural divides. From interior designers to budding hoteliers waiting to create their next place, from travellers to those who simply enjoy the creative process.
And they are tired. Not of travelling, but of choosing; people are decision fatigued. Sorting the real from the staged has become a job in itself, and that is the gap we have always filled.
65% women, 35% men. 60% aged 25 to 45, 24% over 45, 16% under 25. Germany, Switzerland and Austria about a quarter of the readership, the USA and Americas a little over a fifth, the UK and Nordics a sixth, then Southern Europe, Australia and APAC.
3 min 49 sec average time a Sunday Edit reader spends with us per visit.
Nearly a third of newsletter readers come back, and they are four and a half times more likely to act on what they read than a search visitor.
Two in four go on to visit that hotel's own website.

Good company

A property on its own is a write-up. A property set among others that share its DNA is something else: part of an argument about what this kind of place is for.

Every Sunday Edit hangs off a single idea rather than a region or a season. RITUAL SPACES gathered thirteen properties around bathing and stillness. TRANSFORMERS took buildings brought back from ruin. TERROIRS, EARTHY BEAUTS, LIMEWASHED OLIVES, WILDLINGS.

Fifty-two editions over the past year, 240 properties and makers, around a dozen features an edition.

Accidental hoteliers

Ninety-nine per cent of the people in this collection never set out to run a hotel. They fell for a plot of land, or a building nobody else wanted, or inherited the family business and decided that this was what they were going to do.

It is why the artwork on the wall is real. Why an heirloom chest sits perfectly happily against a designer chair. Nothing was specified to a scheme, because there was no scheme, only somebody working out what the building wanted.

We have no criteria built on services or star ratings. How many lifts you have tells us nothing we want to know. What we test for is ownership in the proper sense: the person who answers their own emails, plumps the cushion, opens the window.

Around 260 ask to join each year.
We take fewer than one in ten.

Unsolicited

We did not ask for any of these.

“They are truly gorgeous. There is such a beautiful richness to them — from the photography and paper to the stories, the places and all those little details that make you want to linger over every page rather than simply flick through. They have that rare quality of something made with genuine curiosity, care and a very good eye. We are absolutely delighted to have them here and to be able to share them with our guests.”

TONIA & DIMITRI, AYIOPETRA, NAXOS

“Herewith I just want to share with you my love for the collection of hotels you have on the website. We visited already a few and we were never disappointed. The styling, the people behind and the care of the hotels is something we really appreciate. It’s hard to find beautiful and unique spots. Looking forward to more travels and exploring the world. Thank you for guiding us :-)”

ANITA

“The way you've woven together architecture, sustainability and our earth-friendly ethos captures exactly what we hope Né represents. I'm genuinely moved by it.”

MOTOKI, AUBERGE NÉ, NIIGATA

”This summer we had many guests from Northern Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands who were traveling to Italy or Switzerland and made a stopover with us. Best of all, many of them stopped by again on their way back. Everyone I asked why they chose us gave the same answer: "We saw it on Aficionados..."

STEFANIE, 1280 KRONE, GEISINGEN

“What The Aficionados sent through on a Sunday morning is just quite superb, Monocle earlier in the morning, see what Tyler saying… then you guys … best start to my Sunday… a great read for me (and a second coffee) in my chosen cafe…”

BRAIN

“I am fan of your Sunday newsletters, beautiful magazines and amazing hotels you share. Today we came home from a roadtrip where we stayed at hotel Aqva in Sirmione and hotel Miramonti in the Alpes. Both one of kind, especially because the owners are so extremely careful and kind. Max & Klaus… wow they left an impression. Our business was travel & events for a long time, lucky enough to do some extensive globetrotting but your approach is really one of a kind. So here the compliment, please keep up with the amazing work. We promise to keep on globetrotting the roads.”

KIM & JOHN

“Just wanted to drop you a line to basically thank you for introducing us to the South Tyrol. As we wandered around , a few things struck me
1. We wouldn’t  be here without aficionados
2. It really is a fascinating part of the world not least from a hospitality  perspective
3. Despite the obvious differences between the various hotels on aficionados, there are striking similarities  not least in the way the owners interact with guests. So whatever in built radar you use when accepting hotels - it works.”

CATHRINE, BREAC.HOUSE, DONEGAL

”When we started planning a seven week trip to Italy we went straight to Aficionados. We found Vocabolo Moscatelli and stayed there in April this year.We are now thinking about our travel plans for next year and are looking at making two overseas trips from Sydney, Australia. Any ideas or help you can provide would be greatly appreciated.”

MERLE

“To say we love you is to say nothing. You rock, thank you for having us on board.”

FABIO & SUZANNE, FOLLONICO, TUSCANY

”My wife and I have been travelling around Europe for the last three months and have become great fans of THE AFICIONADOS ~ we have stayed in many of the properties you are associated with and have loved them all ~ we are currently at the beautiful HIRSCHEN in Schwarzenberg, Austria which is absolutely stunning and some of the finest food & wine we have experienced in Europe ~ we would not have found this wonderful property without their association with THE AFICIONADOS ~ so many thanks indeed and keep up the great work!!!”

DAVID & JULIA

“It’s a joy to hold your magazine in our hands and know that we’re a part of it.”

VANESSA & JAN, MERAKI STUDIOS, CRETE

And a reader in the States who followed the January edition to St Anton and Salzburg, mentioned to the Blaue Gans that she had read about them here, and was offered a room.

Two pillars

Our world online

The online one. Your profile, the Edits, the Sunday Edit, the Journal pieces, the satellites that gather around them, the traffic to your own site, and a place in a community of hoteliers, guest house owners and villa owners who tend to be rather useful to one another.

And in print

Two handcrafted magazines a year, a separate undertaking with their own economics. Membership gives you preferential rates on pages, ahead of anybody outside the collection, and a quantity of copies for your own use: in the rooms, at reception, or sold in your shop.

Two channels, two conversations. Most members take both. Nobody has to.

Five things, running all year, all of them pointing at your own website.

01 Your profile
A piece of writing rather than a listing. Three thousand words where the building deserves it, a gallery, your film, the practical detail, and an enquire button that goes to your site and nowhere else.

02 The Edits
Readers browse by sensibility rather than by map. The Alpinists, Unwaxed Lemons, Architerieurs, NEU heritage, Go Private. Your property sits in the ones it belongs to.

03 The Sunday Edit
Every week without a break. Around a dozen features an edition, each hung off a single idea. Your arrival is announced in one of its own, and you appear through the year as the themes come round.

04 The Journal
The longer pieces, and the satellites that gather around you: the interiors, the architect, the stonemason, the artist on the wall. Each a story in its own right, each pointing back.

05 The link
A permanent editorial link to your own site from a domain the search engines have trusted since 2009. It does not expire when a campaign ends.

Everything stays up. A piece written for you this spring is still bringing people to your door in three years.

Coverage that disappears is not coverage. It is a moment.

For the love of digital

A weekly edition that has gone out without a break for years, a Journal that keeps working long after it is published, and a profile page that reads like a piece of writing rather than a listing. Within the site, properties are gathered into Edits rather than regions.
Close to three quarters of a million visits a year to the website, and nearly two million page views. A small readership by the standards of a listing site, but then again we are not just a listing. Real readers and fans that love what we, and you do, are the demographic. We have no ambition to make it a large, meaningless one. Quality of the follower has always mattered more to us than volume.
Organic. Every one of them arrived of their own accord. Rather less than one per cent of our traffic is paid for, and about half of our readers come through search, which is to say they were looking rather than being interrupted. A rented audience disappears the month the spending stops. This one has taken seventeen years to assemble.
And we are not a transactional site. No basket, no checkout. A reader finds you, reads enough to be convinced, and leaves for your own front door. Measured as a referral site rather than a shop, the time people give us before they go is a good deal higher than it has any right to be.
Everything stays up and everything is found: a piece written for you this spring is still bringing people to your door in three years, and a permanent editorial link points at your site throughout.

Digital is fast, measurable and entirely yours to check. Coverage that disappears is not coverage. It is a moment.

The Journal

Inspiration, insider travel and the people behind the places. Posts that drive readers to destinations, member hotels and the makers we admire, and that keep working for years rather than weeks.

theaficionados.com/journal

The Sunday Edit

Every Sunday. A recent edition: six centuries of good bones, art that moved into somebody else's house, and a new series on buildings with previous lives. A Walser farmhouse of 1393, a Syros tax office turned hotel, a coppersmith turned suite, a timber store turned Vienna's best table. Four countries, six centuries and a maker, held together by one idea rather than a map.

Join Us

The Magazine

Two style-led magazines a year and a seasonal newspaper. Into 3,600 bedrooms across the collection, and sold at Iconic, Do You Read Me?, Soda Books, New Mags and the Monocle Cafes. Fans can also purchase the latest editions online with us.

Learn more

When somebody asks an assistant where to stay in the Bregenzerwald, it does not consult a rate grid. It reads.

It wants substantial, well-written, interlinked prose about real places by identifiable people, and it finds that far more readily on an editorial site than on a booking platform, which is largely inventory wearing a thin coat of description.

Which puts a non-booking channel in an unusually good position. The assistant reads our piece about your house, understands what the place actually is, and sends the reader to your own site. No intermediary, no commission, no rate comparison on the way.

It also explains why an earned audience is worth more here than a bought one. You cannot buy your way into being recommended, only written into it.

AI assistants started sending us readers this year, having sent none at all the year before.

It is a small number today.
We do not expect it to stay small as AI loves well-written content, something we have in abundance.

For the love of print

Two style-led magazines a year, 25,000 each, and a seasonal newspaper. 148 pages, soft bound, printed in Austria on FSC-certified paper. Limited edition, never reprinted.
Within each, properties are read through design registers rather than regions: Eclectics, Contemporary, Aesthetes, Heritage, Rustico.
They go into 3,600 bedrooms, suites and villas across the collection. Your story is in a hundred other people's bedrooms, and theirs is in yours. Nobody clicks anything, and the recommendation lands anyway.
Sold at Iconic in New York, Do You Read Me? in Berlin, New Mags in Copenhagen, Soda Books in Munich, Papercut in Stockholm, Softcover in Vienna, Frab’s in Milan, … and the Monocle Cafés in Zurich, Toronto, Merano, Tokyo and London.

Print is slow, expensive and entirely unmeasurable, and we have no intention of giving it up.

The family

We would not call them like-minded, and would not much want to be in a collection of like-minded people. What they share is narrower and more useful: a passion for detail, a respect for craft, a habit of supporting the industries on their own doorstep.
They bring each other in. They carry each other, since the magazine sits in every member's rooms. They pass readers along. And they share the people who made them, because the kind of owner who commissions that sort of work tends to know the others who have.
Less a collection of hotels than a set of siblings, who between them make up a world.
We are a whisper across a dinner table, which is a slow way to grow and the only one worth having.

We keep the work in-house wherever we can, and where we cannot, we tend to end up alongside artisans and studios who own their own companies too. That is not a coincidence. It is the same instinct that draws us to the hotels.

We do not chase trends, though we would like to think we stay some way ahead of the field on the writing and the presentation, and that everything we put out has a reason for existing and something behind it.

Our own money, invested carefully, which is why the company has grown at the pace we wanted rather than the pace somebody else wanted.

There are no external investors and there never have been. That is deliberate. It keeps the thing true to the idea it started as, it lets us move quickly when the scene shifts, and it means nobody has ever had to explain to a board why a property was turned down for reasons that would not fit on a spreadsheet.

One family business talking to another, in other words.
Which is usually the easiest conversation either of us has all week.

What we ask of you

Membership is not a form you fill in, and the properties that do best here treat it as a collaboration.
**+ A call**
Half an hour with whoever made the decisions, whether that is you, your architect or your designer. It is the difference between a description and a piece of writing.
**+ Your images**
Your own image bank at full resolution, with permission to publish. If it needs strengthening, we know good photographers.
**+ The credits**
The architect, the interior designer, the makers. We name them, and it improves the work for everyone.
**+ A link back**
Most members carry our mark in their footer, linking to their profile. It costs nothing and works both ways.
**+ A word when things change**
A profile gone stale serves neither of us.

What we will never ask for is your availability, your rates, or a slice of anything you earn.

How it works, and the ballpark

No commission. No booking fee.
Nothing per guest.

**Everything in-house**
Nobody descends on you with a crew. We read the building closely and ask for a call, partly to gather what we cannot find elsewhere and partly to be sure we fit each other.
**Your images**
We work from your own image bank. If it needs strengthening, we know good photographers in most of the countries we cover.
**You approve it**
A proof comes to you before anybody else sees it. Nothing goes live until you are happy with it.
**Ten working days**
From signed contract and settled invoice, your profile is online. Your arrival is announced in a Sunday Edit of its own.
A one-time setup fee, then an annual membership fee set by the size of the property, its location and how seasonal the business is. Annual and rolling, two-year minimum, because that is how long it takes for the writing, the Edits and the print to compound into something worth measuring. The magazines are costed separately, at member rates.
Whatever a reader spends with you is yours.

The usual trouble with marketing a hotel is that the people selling it to you tend also to be the people counting it for you.

Every link we send to your website carries a tag identifying it as ours, so the visits appear in your own Google Analytics under our name rather than vanishing into direct traffic. You do not have to ask us for the figure, and you do not have to believe us when we give it. It is in your account, and it is yours.

Print cannot be tracked, and nor can a recommendation made over dinner, or a guest who read about you in March and booked in September. A fair amount of what we do will never show up in anybody's analytics. We would rather say so than pretend otherwise.