Explore the best travel books of 2025, featuring luxurious hotels, stunning landscapes, and cultural insights. Perfect for wanderlust and design inspiration.
A life of travel can mean many things—whether it’s the new breed of digital nomads taking residence around the globe, hotel-dwellers who rarely see home, or those living day by day on the road, and for the most part, it generally doesn’t mean traveling 24/7.
These books, however, offer a way of bringing the essence of travel into your home to flick through whenever you feel the pull of the world or the desire to inspire a little travel inspiration.
Each page is an immersive glimpse into the ambiance of luxury hotels, views of far-off locales, and stunning cinematic landscapes. Each flick of a page evokes wanderlust, with new destination discoveries from Iceland to the wilds of the USA, while other pages ping memories of journeys long since past.
Yet, they offer more than mementos; these travel books provide an intimate look at the cultures we travel for. They portray detailed design philosophies and the artistry of hospitality, acting as passports to inspiration, capturing the intimate, enduring beauty that defines a life of travel.
Aman: Places of Peace
Aman’s beautiful Places of Peace coffee table book is often left out for browsing in Aman’s stunning villas across the world, and somehow, despite the impeccable locales of places like the Amanoi, Amantaka, and Amanjiwo, the book captivates and pulls you into scenes of villas perched on mountains, smiling workers on plantations, and beaches sketched into dreamy coves. But even by travel standards, this is no ordinary book.
It explores the expected themes: the resorts and the stunning architecture of an Aman hotel, but it’s also a study of exceptional luxury, a masterclass in location scouting, and a catalog of experiential adventure.
The photography is sublime, showcasing not just landscapes and scenery shots, but details of the always impeccable interiors, charming portraits of local workers, and the vibrant communities that Aman seeks to positively affect.
Buy here: shop.aman.com
Pig Hotels: 500 Miles of Food, Friends, and Local Legends
England’s Pig Hotels are somewhat of an enigma to travelers in the UK. Each is built around the concept of a restaurant with rooms, but those rooms are in large, converted country houses with vast kitchen gardens, farmhouses converted to family rooms, and luxurious eco-wagons for couples with outdoor showers, enjoyed all the more on frosty mornings overlooking the verdant countryside.
But despite this, they have, for the most part, stayed off the radar of international travelers, which is perhaps in part due to their purposeful 3-star, stripped-back ethos. Nonetheless, it’s a shame, as they offer some of the most culturally British lifestyle experiences currently available—all homegrown and off the beaten path.
This, the Pig’s second book, highlights the counties in which you’ll find their hotels, showcasing areas like Cornwall and Kent and introducing readers to the artisans who make The Pig’s local produce menus possible. Furthermore, the physical book is fully produced in England with paper from a traditional mill, showcasing their commitment to caring for and supporting local communities.
Slow Escapes
This lovely little travel book, Slow Escapes, offers a refreshing guide to slow travel, showcasing hotels, guesthouses, and retreats that breathe life into unspoiled rural destinations.
The places held in these pages are the type of hotels that nurture deep connections to local culture, nature, and community—the places you go to to spend time with your senses and to take in the scenery far away from the trails of mass tourism.
The book is firmly grounded in the principles of the slow movement and looks at ideas such as sustainability, heritage, slow food, and social responsibility. Flick through the pages, and you’ll find Icelandic sheep farms, new-age finca in Andalusia, and a hotel cum social enterprise set on an island in the North Atlantic.
Four Seasons
This exceptionally attractive book from Assouline offers a wonderful portrait of the Four Seasons hotels through artist Ignasi Monreal’s colorful paintings. The book aims to capture the folk behind the hotel: the operations staff—the spa manager, executive chef, concierge, sommelier, and florist—who each make a difference in a guest’s stay.
But for those seeking something beautiful, it’s more than that. The art direction conjures the glory days of travel, with colorful portraits of everything from bar managers and their cocktails to cleaners gathering petals from beneath a sakura tree.
Focused on the present — with mobile phones and other modern artifacts, yet with a nostalgic nod to the past, the art conjures travel marketing of the 1920s, with long, elegant lines that would be equally at home in a fashion illustration book as in a travel book.
Assouline’s Four Seasons is a stunning fantasy-laced collection, as much for travel lovers as for aesthetes looking for something pretty to get lost in.
British Boutique Hotels
Hoxton Mini Press is a small, independent East London publisher making collectible books about London and the UK. Each edition is carbon-neutral and printed with stunning, immersive photography and evocative words that pull readers into the subject with a familiarity rarely captured by modern print.
This book, British Boutique Hotels, explores some of Britain’s best boutique hotels, from the Middleton Lodge Estate in North England and The Royston in Wales to The Fife Arms in Scotland and London’s Redchurch Townhouse.
The photography is familiar and pretty, with an Instagram feel, as though opening the book applies a dreamy travel filter. The writing is evocative, allowing a brisk dive into each hotel with more than enough info to make an informed decision on whether to book a night or just live a moment or two through the pages.
Bon Voyage: Boutique Hotels for the Conscious Traveler
Sustainable travel doesn’t mean sacrificing luxury or comfort, and this book, Bon Voyage: Boutique Hotels for the Conscious Traveler, seeks to teach this to a new generation of travelers by highlighting international retreats that combine gorgeous design and eco-conscious practices to benefit travelers and local communities in equal measure.
The collection of hotels and lodges here are all presented as eco-responsible, boutique, and beautiful. These include a spot in the Namibian desert preserving wildlife in a lodge built from shipwrecks, old French barns converted to a hotel with no check-in/ out times, and a Beirut guesthouse where locals teach guests to cook while sharing family recipes.
The photography is brilliant, with immersive shots of rooms and guests staring out at divine landscapes from divine bedrooms and cozy interiors. The accompanying text reviews the hotel but also gives insight into exactly what makes the hotel suitable for conscious travelers without any of the usual marketing fluff.
Great Escapes USA: The Hotel Book
One of the world’s most varied landscapes is brought to life in Great Escapes USA: The Hotel Book. It captures places like Yosemite National Park, Monument Valley, and the East Coast magnificently, traveling via hotels such as Twin Farms in Vermont, the glamorous Commodore Perry Estate in Austin, and Dunton Hot Springs in Colorado, an enchanting 1800s ghost town transformed into a desirable alpine resort.
Expect images of glittering lakes under blistering summer suns, cowboys on horseback surrounded by mountain landscapes, long panoramas of desert scenes, colorful small-town Americana, and Native American enclaves: the soul of the USA.
Belmond: The As Seen By Collection
Belmond’s As Seen By Collection is a series of books exploring one specific Belmond property or destination through the eyes of a single, hand-selected photographer.
Each book is as pretty as the next, with enviable shots of places like Belmond’s Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons Hotel in England but any traveler worth their salt knows that what Belmond truly excels at is train travel. And here, within the rail-inspired pages of the Eastern & Oriental Express, is where you’ll find something truly exceptional.
The photographer is Stefanie Moshammer, and her photos aboard the train, which journeys from Singapore through lush jungles to Malaysia, are filled with a sense of adventure and magical realism.
Many of the shots are blurred, promoting a feeling of movement, with the world outside the train providing a lush bokeh-like background, while portraits of people aboard the train are often presented dreamy and colorful, with plants obscuring faces and bowls of tropical fruits used to introduce a riotous slab of color to each page.
Paris, Louis Vuitton
Louis Vuitton’s little flip books of places like London, Tokyo, and Mars are an extraordinary addition to any travel book collection. But the Paris book, a pictorial exploration of Paris by Brecht Evans, is nothing short of stunning.
The images unfold in cartoonish scenes, touching on surrealism with a bald graphic tone, with more than 100 images made from watercolor, gouache, Indian ink, and colored pencils. The images contain every cliche from Paris, from the cafe culture and the Metro to the Eiffel Tower, sketched into a black sky, its light illuminating a confluence of red and blue clouds.
The entire book unfolds like an avalanche of color, celebrating France’s (and Belgium’s via the artist) history of graphic art through its most beloved city.
9 Top Travel Coffee Table Books & Luxury Hotels Catalogs in 2025
- Paris, Louis Vuitton
- Aman: Places of Peace
- Pig Hotels: 500 Miles of Food, Friends, and Local Legends
- Slow Escapes
- Four Seasons
- British Boutique Hotels
- Bon Voyage: Boutique Hotels for the Conscious Traveler
- Great Escapes USA: The Hotel Book
- Belmond: The As Seen By Collection
If you have another book in mind, suggest it to us at hello@localsinsider.com!
