Four HOSHINOYA resorts share the 2026 MICHELIN Keys, two of them for the first time
Three of the four Key-holding HOSHINOYA properties sit in Japan, and the fourth is run by the same Japanese operator in Taiwan — a breadth test for Hoshino's luxury-ryokan format beyond its original Kyoto flagship.
Hoshino Resorts said four of its HOSHINOYA properties have each been awarded a MICHELIN Key for 2026 — the Michelin Guide's hotel rating, introduced in 2024 alongside its long-running restaurant stars — with three of the four sitting in Japan.
According to the company, HOSHINOYA Kyoto and HOSHINOYA Guguan, its hot-spring resort in Taiwan, held on to their Keys for a second consecutive year. HOSHINOYA Okinawa and HOSHINOYA Taketomi Island, in Okinawa's Yaeyama Islands, won the award for the first time.
Hoshino singled out Taketomi Island's setting inside what it called Japan's first International Dark Sky Park, tying the Key to the property's stargazing draw as much as its rooms.
A single flagship winning once is a one-off; four properties across two countries holding Keys — two of them for the second year running — says more about the consistency of Hoshino's luxury-ryokan format than any one hotel's score could. It also lands in the same week the company confirmed a tenth HOSHINOYA, in Nara's Asuka Village, extending a top-tier estate that increasingly leans on outside validation — Michelin, UNESCO listings, dark-sky status — as a selling point in its own right, on top of nightly rates that already run several times a standard ryokan stay. For a traveller assembling a Japan luxury itinerary, that gives one operator four bookable, externally rated answers, at home and across the strait.