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The record
1,321 years
Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan
Japan
The record
The oldest hotel in the world is Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, in Japan — 1,321 years, age.
Source: Guinness World Records (certified 2011) / Wikipedia. Verified .
Norwich's Maids Head advertises hospitality since the 1090s, and Salzburg's St. Peter Stiftskulinarium has been serving guests since 803 — neither makes this list. One cannot document its claim; the other has no beds. What follows is the world's twelve oldest hotels ranked strictly on the earliest founding year the historical record actually carries, running from 1,321 years down to 715.
Two rules do the work. The measure is documented lodging on the present site, which is why Zum Roten Bären ranks from 1311 rather than the 1120 painted on its own wall. And every entry must still take a booking tonight, which rules out Isfahan's Safavid caravanserai and Turkey's restored Obruk — beautiful buildings, but hotels only since the twentieth century. Eight of the twelve are Japanese ryokan, and that is the story.
Eight of the twelve are Japanese hot-spring ryokan — and that is not a quirk of sampling. A spring carries a permanent water right, which is an asset worth handing down intact, and Japan's shinise tradition of long-established family firms made handing it down the default.
The three oldest were founded within thirteen years of each other — Keiunkan in 705, Koman in 717 and Hōshi in 718 — and then no hotel on this list survives for another 357 years.
Guinness only moved the record in 2011. Hōshi Ryokan was recognised as the world's oldest hotel until Keiunkan's 705 founding was verified and took the title.
Hōshi kept the better record anyway — forty-six generations of one family, making it the longest continuously run family business on Earth.
The Angel and Royal was built by the Knights Templar in 1203, and taken from them in 1308 when the Sheriff of Lincolnshire seized it on the order of Edward II.
Zum Roten Bären's landlords can be traced through more than ninety surviving documents, an unbroken chain of Freiburg innkeepers running from 1311 to the fifty-first landlord pouring drinks today.
At 1,321 years, Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan is the oldest hotel on Earth, and Guinness World Records has said so in writing since 2011. Fujiwara Mahito, son of an aide to Emperor Tenji, found hot water running out of a mountainside in Japan's Keiun era and built an inn beside it; the hotel still carries the era's name. Generation after generation of the same family has kept it open ever since.
It sits deep in the Akaishi Mountains above the Hayakawa river, a long run of switchbacks from the nearest town, with 37 rooms and hot-spring baths fed straight from the source. The remoteness is the point. This is not a museum with a reception desk but a working ryokan that has simply never had a reason to stop.
Twelve years younger than the record holder at 1,309 years, Sennen no Yu Koman is the second-oldest hotel in the world — and the margin between it and the entry below is a single year. Its name translates roughly as the thousand-year bath, which undersells it by three centuries.
Koman stands in Kinosaki Onsen, the willow-lined canal town in northern Hyogo where guests walk between seven public bathhouses in wooden geta and cotton yukata rather than staying put in one hotel. That custom is why Kinosaki's inns stayed small and survived: here the town is the resort, and the buildings along it are the rooms.
Hōshi Ryokan has been taking guests for 1,308 years, one year less than Koman, and it held the Guinness title as the world's oldest hotel until Keiunkan's older claim was verified in 2011. It kept a different record, and arguably the better one: forty-six generations of a single family, the longest continuously run family business anywhere on Earth.
It was founded under the guidance of the monk Taichō, credited with opening the Hakusan mountain faith, and draws on the Awazu hot spring in Ishikawa. Each head of the house takes the name Zengorō along with the business — a succession that has outlasted the samurai, two imperial restorations and every hotel chain ever founded.
At 951 years, Takahan Ryokan is the oldest hotel outside the trio of ancient Japanese hot springs above it, and the first entry here founded in the second millennium. Hanroku Takahashi tracked animals to a spring in the snow country of old Echigo province in 1075, settled beside it, and his family built the inn that still runs on the spot.
Takahan taps Tamago no Yu, the egg water, the one free-flowing sulphur source in Echigo-Yuzawa. It is also a literary shrine: Yasunari Kawabata wrote much of Snow Country here, and the room he worked in, Kasumi no Ma, is kept as a small museum inside the hotel.
Geto Onsen Motoyugeto has been open for 892 years at the end of a narrow road in the Iwate mountains, and it is the hardest entry on this list to reach. It belongs to the Association to Protect Japan's Secret Hot Springs, which reads less as a marketing badge than as an accurate warning about the drive.
Seven separate springs surface along the Geto river gorge here, feeding open-air baths built straight onto the rock. The inn works around the weather rather than against it, going quiet under deep snow through the winter and opening again in spring — the same seasonal rhythm it has kept since 1134.
One year younger than Geto Onsen at 891 years, The Olde Bell is the oldest hotel in Britain and the first non-Japanese entry on this list. It went up in 1135 as the guest house of Hurley Priory, which means it was putting up travellers before the priory it served was finished.
The Sanctus Bell still hangs over the door of the Grade II*-listed building — for centuries it was rung to tell the monks that an important visitor had reached the village — while the rooms behind it carry a contemporary designer's refit. It stands on the Thames a short drive from Windsor, close enough to London that it has spent nine centuries as a first night out of the city.
Shirasagiyu Tawaraya has run for 836 years and is the oldest inn in Yamanaka Onsen — the last survivor of the twelve houses that grew up around the spring's medieval revival. The same family has held it for twenty-five generations.
Its name records the legend of the spring itself: shirasagi means white heron, and the bird is said to have been found healing an injured leg in the hot water. The inn stands directly above the Kakusenkei gorge, where the Daishoji river runs through a rock cut lined with maples — scenery striking enough that the poet Bashō broke his journey at Yamanaka to see it.
A single year separates Tosen Goshobo from Tawaraya: 835 years, founded in 1191, and the oldest inn in Arima Onsen, the hot spring that served Kyoto and Osaka long before Kobe grew up around it. Sixteen generations have kept it running.
Arima's water is kinsen, golden spring — so heavy with iron and salt that it oxidises to a deep rust brown the moment it meets the air. Goshobo takes its name, meaning imperial residence, from the visits of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, and its guest list runs on through Toyotomi Hideyoshi to the novelist Junichiro Tanizaki.
At 834 years, Yoshinoya Irokuen completes a remarkable three-year run — 1190, 1191, 1192 — in which three of the world's oldest surviving inns were all founded. It is the second-oldest house in Yamanaka Onsen, a few minutes on foot from Tawaraya.
1192 is a date every Japanese schoolchild learns: the year Minamoto no Yoritomo took the title of shogun and the Kamakura period began. This inn has been open through the whole of that era and every era since, which is a way of saying it has watched the entire history of the samurai from a bath.
The Angel and Royal has stood on Grantham's high street for 823 years, raised in 1203 by the Knights Templar as a hostel on the Great North Road. The Templars ran it for a century, until the Sheriff of Lincolnshire seized it in 1308 on the order of Edward II.
Its Grade I-listed stone frontage is among the oldest surviving inn façades in England, and the carved heads of Edward III and Queen Philippa look down from the corbels beside its oriel window. King John held court here in February 1213; the Royal was appended to the name after the future Edward VII stayed in 1866.
At 806 years, The Old Bell is the youngest of the three British entries and the only one built for the job: raised around 1220 as the guest house of Malmesbury Abbey, on ground the monks cleared when they acquired and pulled down the castle four years earlier. It calls itself England's oldest purpose-built hotel.
Much of the thirteenth-century fabric survives, including an ashlar stone fireplace in the bar counted among the earliest domestic fireplaces in England. It was the Castle Inn until 1798, a name the vanished fortress beneath it had earned, and it sits beside the abbey where the monk Eilmer is said to have strapped on wings and jumped.
At 715 years, Zum Roten Bären is Germany's oldest guesthouse and the only continental European entry to make the cut. Its 1311 date is the one the documents carry — a Freiburg property dispute naming the innkeeper Johann Bienger — not the 1120 the house paints on its own wall, which is the year the city itself was founded.
That distinction is also what puts it here rather than Japan's Notoya, founded in the very same year: the Bären's site carries documented use as an inn back into the twelfth century, so on the measure this list uses it reaches further back. Freiburg threw it a 700th birthday in 2011. Above the medieval cellar the building is Baroque, finished in 1718, and the fifty-first landlord is behind the bar.
FAQ: The World's Oldest Hotels
What is the oldest hotel in the world?
Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan in Hayakawa, Yamanashi, founded in 705 and now 1,321 years old. Guinness World Records has recognised it as the world's oldest hotel since 2011. It is a working hot-spring ryokan of 37 rooms in the Akaishi Mountains, run by the same family line since the Nara period, and it still takes bookings.
Can you actually stay in these hotels?
Yes — that is a deliberate rule of this ranking. Every entry must still take a booking today, which is why some famous old buildings are absent. Isfahan's Abbasi Hotel occupies a Safavid caravanserai but only became a hotel in the twentieth century, and Turkey's restored Obruk caravanserai is a recent conversion rather than a business that never stopped.
Why are so many of the world's oldest hotels in Japan?
Eight of the twelve are Japanese, and every one is built on a hot spring. A spring with a permanent water right is an asset worth handing down intact, and Japan's shinise tradition of long-established family businesses made handing it down the default rather than the exception. Timber buildings are also repaired and rebuilt in place, so the business survives even when the fabric does not.
What is the oldest hotel in Europe?
The Olde Bell in Hurley, Berkshire, founded in 1135 as the guest house of Hurley Priory and 891 years old. Britain holds the next two European places as well, with the Angel and Royal in Grantham and the Old Bell in Malmesbury. Zum Roten Bären in Freiburg, at 715 years, is the oldest on the European mainland.
How do you decide which hotel is really the oldest?
By the earliest founding year the historical record actually carries, not the year painted on the sign. Many old inns market a date centuries earlier than anything documented, so this list ranks on documented lodging at the present site.
That is why Zum Roten Bären appears at 1311 rather than 1120, and why Norwich's Maids Head, which claims the 1090s, does not appear at all. The same documented-record rule decides our rankings of the world's oldest bridges and its oldest living trees.
