From Sorrento To Positano, These Are The Top 17 Hotels On The Amalfi Coast According To Tablet Hotels

By Jim Dobson

For centuries the dramatic appeal of the Amalfi Coast has attracted some of the most famous people in the world, from Roman nobles to legendary writers and celebrities. The steep winding mountains and cascading cliffs are covered with stunning villas and hotels making this one of the most popular Summer destinations in the world. Positano, Ravello, and Amalfi are the area’s most frequented places, with so many crowds during the high season it is almost unbearable.

You can take a ferry along the coast from Naples, Sorrento, and travel easily to Salerno and Positano, while visiting all of the towns in between. Taking a car is a nightmare during the high season with delays lasting several hours at times through the narrow switchbacks high on the cliffsides. Make sure to book your visit to the area at least a year in advance for any of these spectacular properties.

I spoke with Lucy Lieberman, the new CEO for Tablet Hotels and she explains the selection of this years top rated hotels on the Amalfi Coast. “We’ve taken into account the quality of the hotels in the region: how our clients rate them, whether or not they’re in Plus and provide added benefits to travelers booking with Tablet (or Michelin Guide), and our relationship with them (which is always a good indicator of how well they will treat their guests). Tablet selects the world’s most exciting hotels — places where you’ll get a memorable experience, not just a room for the night, hotels that stand out for their style, service, and personality — regardless of price. We are consistently adding hotels to our selection while also pruning the list, ensuring that we don’t have every hotel, we have every hotel that matters.”

Here are the top hotels on the Amalfi Coast according to Tablet including traveler verified feedback rankings above 19 out of 20 possible.

AMALFI

Hotel Santa Caterina

67 rooms, 19.6 Score

“It’s the rare traditional-style hotel that really gets us going, but the Santa Caterina is an absolute classic. Family-owned for the better part of a century, it sits high on a hillside facing the sea and the town of Amalfi — guests ride an elevator down to the hotel’s private beach, for the ultimate storybook Italian-coast experience.”

NH Collection Grand Hotel Convento di Amalfi

53 rooms, 19.0 Score

“This old convent hangs on the cliffside at the edge of the storied Amalfi Coast, you’d think some extremely twelfth-century property developers had planned this place with the 21st-century hotel market in mind.”

CAPRI

JK Place

22 rooms, 19.8 Score

“JK Place is one of the only hotels in Capri that’s right on the ocean, and it could hardly be more central — it’s in the Roman old town, on a cliff overlooking the harbor. That right there pretty much sums up the approach: no expense spared, no corners cut, and nothing out of place. Just a phenomenal location.”

Capri Tiberio Palace

46 rooms, 19.3 Score

“Tiberio Palace embodies the kind of effortless mod-Mediterranean hospitality that takes its cues from the suave cool of sixties cinema. Aided by a palette of soft creams, the environment announces itself with the lightest of touches, like a pair of white linen pants. The hotel is perched just high enough to provide a good look at the island’s greenery, dotted with villas cascading down to the sea.”

Hotel Caesar Augustus

58 rooms. 19 Score

“The views are the main attraction at the Caesar Augustus Hotel; one imagines that Caesar himself would not settle for a cliffside hotel any less than a thousand feet above the Bay of Naples. The “infinity pool” is by now a familiar concept, but from this high perch it regains much of its novelty, and it’s easy to feel as tall as Mount Vesuvius from here.”

POSITANO

Il San Pietro di Positano

20 rooms, 20 Score

“A small 17th-century chapel devoted to San Pietro marks the hotel entrance, and the rest of the property hangs on the cliffside below, each level descending the face like a staircase—perhaps a disquieting experience for those not comfortable with heights, but offering unparalleled views of the sea from every room and every terrace. The hotel is built just one room deep, and there are no inferior views; each room hugs the cliff at its back side and opens onto a private terrace at the front.”

Hotel Palazzo Murat

20 rooms. 20 Score

“This splendid palazzo, once chosen by Murat as his residence, has been converted into a hotel right in the heart of Positano. Situated on a romantic pedestrian street covered with bougainvillea, it boasts a spectacular garden-cum-citrus orchard and elegant guestrooms decorated in typical local style, all just a stone’s throw from the Duomo and the beach.”

Le Sirenuse

59 rooms, 19.4 Score

“Le Sirenuse is remarkably un-hotel-like. For two hundred and fifty years it was the summer house of the noble Neapolitan family Marchese Sersale, who still run the hotel. Inside, it is simple and lovely, with an authenticity so unpretentious it is almost careless. This is not your typical historic hotel. The floors are glazed tile, the windows are delicately scalloped, and the pale-hued bedrooms have plain white beds and antiques that have been lovingly compiled since the family first moved here. The bar is small and, just as in the restaurant, vines of grape and bougainvillea have crept up its walls. Le Sirenuse, by the way, is generally acknowledged to have the best seafood restaurant in town.”

Hotel Villa Franca Positano

44 rooms, 19.1 Score

“The villa was a private home until the family turned it into a boutique hotel, so the place is filled with designer pieces and thoughtful details from an Italian film library to vintage board games. It has the coziness of a guesthouse and, thanks to the rooftop pool, a great spa, and a pair of gourmet restaurants, the wow factor of a luxury hotel. Like every other building in the heart of old Positano, the villa is built right into the steep cliffside.”

PRAIANO

Casa Angelina

42 rooms, 19.2 Score

“Casa Angelina, is a rare hotel that makes a virtue of modern architecture and design even in these most traditional environs — and, in the process, establishes a tone of understated luxury that few hotels anywhere can match. Most of the rooms have terraces opening onto those astonishing views, and there are plenty of them in the common spaces as well. There’s a terrace with an outdoor pool, and a hydrotherapy pool in the hotel’s spa — and there’s always the beach, which is a dramatic elevator ride plus a further two hundred steps down from Casa Angelina’s cliffside position.”

Hotel Poseidon

17 rooms, 19.3 Score

“Originally constructed as a private villa, the Hotel Poseidon opened its doors to the public in 1950, and is still going strong as a member of Positano’s small-but-elite fraternity of classic luxury hotels. It’s set halfway up Positano’s curving slope, on the sunrise-facing side, giving it a spectacular view of the town and the sea, as well as easy enough access to the beach.”

RAVELLO

Caruso, A Belmond Hotel, Amalfi Coast

50 rooms, 19.9 Score

“High on a cliffside in Ravello, the view of the coast from its terrace has been described as the most beautiful in the world by no less an authority than Gore Vidal. Rooms wind and wend through the building, each different, all sumptuously furnished and most with views that range from rather good to jaw-dropping. It’s been renovated, yes, but hardly modernized — it’s still got the classic looks (and old-world service) that made it a favorite in the first place.”

Palazzo Avino

43 rooms, 19 Score

“Palazzo Avino is at once charmingly ancient and sparklingly new: this 12th-century palace has been one of Europe’s top hotels since the 1880s.. Floors and staircases are of marble, and contemporary artworks line the walls of the public spaces, with abundant sofas and chairs positioned for quiet contemplation. The pool area is a luxurious idyll, made a touch more dramatic by the astonishing view—whether from poolside, or from the underwater picture window, guests are treated to a panorama that takes in the hillsides and villages of the coastline and the deep blue sea beyond.”

SORRENTO

La Minervetta

12 rooms, 19.7 Score

“Rather than monochrome and minimal, the rooms are bright and sunny — literally, as they’re open to the light, with views through full-length windows over Sorrento, the Bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius, and figuratively as well, clean-lined and decked out in vivid tones, anywhere from lime green and turquoise to simple, almost Nordic primary colors.”

Bellevue Syrene 1820

50 rooms, 19.4 Score

“This classic five-star hotel has been an Italian favorite since its opening in 1820, and it’s easy to see why: this cliffside villa looks out over the waterfront and the Bay of Naples from one of Sorrento’s most privileged positions. To this day the Bellevue Syrene drips with 19th-century elegance, scarcely diminished by the recent renovations — while some of the furnishings and décor have been modernized, the atmosphere as a whole is as regal as ever.”

Art Hotel Villa Fiorella

23 rooms, 19.3 Score

“Art Hotel Villa Fiorella, is a quiet boutique hotel set in an olive grove high over the water. The villa is actually a relatively new construction, and after extensive restorations in 2016, it feels thoroughly modern. Inside is all pale wood, pristine white, and wide picture windows framing the sea and sky. The views are the thing here, whether you’re savoring the landscape from the vantage point of your bed or the infinity pool or one of the hotel’s sunny terraces.”

Grand Hotel Excelsior Vittoria

84 rooms, 19.0 Score

“The Grand Hotel Excelsior Vittoria benefits from a phenomenal location, right in the heart of Sorrento, high on a cliff overlooking the harbor and separated from the bustling Piazza Tasso by orange groves and acres of parkland. The hotel itself comprises three separate villas, all built between 1834 and 1880. This is a true Grand Hotel in the old style, its past guests including Wagner and Goethe, and the opera singer Enrico Caruso was a resident for a time in the twenties, his suite today remaining more or less as he left it. As if that weren’t enough, Emperor Augustus himself kept a villa here.”

Via Forbes