Find your stay across every Australian landscape.
Beachfront, reef, outback, rainforest, vineyard — find the kind of place your trip calls for, in towns across Australia.
Popular destinations
Popular stay types
Pick the kind of trip you're taking and we'll show you the towns and stays that fit.
Adults-only
Grown-up calm, made for couples and honeymoons.
Beachfront
Stays right on the sand, with the ocean a few steps from your door.
Boutique
In Australia, a boutique hotel usually means a small, independently minded house with a story of its own: Gourmet Traveller's 2025 Hotel Guide only admits hotels of 50 rooms or fewer to its boutique list. The hotels gathered here, just over 50 of them, are broader than that. They mix genuinely small places with larger hotels chosen for their building or design. Adelaide has the most, six, then Brisbane with four; Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart have three each, exactly as many as Tamworth, Ballarat, Launceston and Townsville. History is where Australian boutique stays are strongest. Hadley's Orient Hotel in Hobart opened in 1834 as the Golden Anchor Inn, built by convict labour, and Roald Amundsen stayed there in 1912 after reaching the South Pole. In Melbourne, Treasury on Collins occupies the 1876 Bank of Australasia building designed by Joseph Reed, with three storeys added in 1930. In Brisbane's New Farm, Spicers Balfour splits 17 rooms between a converted Queenslander and the Art Deco Simla building a few doors away. Adelaide earns its lead with a hotel that is anything but small. The Oval Hotel, opened in September 2020 as Australia's first stadium hotel, has 138 rooms wrapped around the eastern side of Adelaide Oval. The rooms face the parklands and St Peter's Cathedral, not the pitch, which you see from the Bespoke Wine Bar and Kitchen, the hotel's restaurant overlooking the turf. The other Adelaide names here are The Franklin Boutique Hotel, The Chancellor on Currie, Adelaide Mansions Apartments, the Pullman and the Mayfair. Among the hotels here with at least 100 reviews, The Lyall in South Yarra leads at 9.6 from 177 reviews: 50 rooms, seven of them suites, with its own bar and bistro on Murphy Street. Yallungah Boutique Hotel in Orange follows at 9.5, then two at 9.3: Imperial Boutique Accommodation in Eumundi, in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, from 764 reviews, and Noosa Boutique Apartments & Elkhorn Villas in Noosa Heads, from 203. Plumes in Tamworth also shows 9.5, but from only four reviews, too few to rank it. Know which building you are sleeping in. At CH Boutique Hotel, 52 Brisbane Street in Tamworth, the Executive King Suites sit in a newer extension while other rooms are in the older Peel wing, two quite different stays under one name. Tamworth's busiest time is its Country Music Festival, from 15 to 24 January 2027. I would not choose a boutique stay for a family that needs connecting rooms and a large pool: a city resort does that better.
Bush Retreat
A real bush retreat in Australia means a cabin or lodge inside or against a national park, usually well back from the coast, and I have to be straight with you: none of the five hotels shown on this page is one. They average 8.68 out of 10 across 8,506 reviews, so they are well run; they are simply city and beach hotels. JW Marriott Gold Coast is in Surfers Paradise, built around a saltwater lagoon with an artificial reef, and Silvershore Apartments faces the Broadwater, with hinterland views from some balconies. Crown Towers Perth stands by the casino at Burswood, and Highpoint International is an apartment hotel in the Gladstone CBD. The Hinterland Hotel is the nearest match in name only: a pub hotel in suburban Upper Coomera, with a bistro and a sports bar, still down on the coastal plain. If what you want is tall forest, birdsong and dark nights, the places in the next paragraphs are not among these five, but they are where I would actually sleep. From the Gold Coast, Tamborine Mountain is mountain rainforest you can sleep in, about 45 minutes inland from Surfers Paradise up a winding road. Tamborine Mountain Glades sits in 112 ha of rainforest and has a high-ropes adventure park, while Mt Tamborine Stonehaven Guest House, a manor-style guesthouse with whirlpool baths, is a short drive from the Tamborine Rainforest Skywalk. For a first night out of the city I would pick Tamborine, because it gives you rainforest without an hour of mountain road at the end of the day. Lamington National Park is the deeper option. Binna Burra is about 70 minutes from Broadbeach via Nerang and Beechmont, the last 1.8 km narrow and winding. The Green Mountains section means roughly 40 km from Broadbeach to Canungra via Nerang, then 36 km of slow mountain road taking at least 50 minutes, so I would sleep up there rather than drive it twice in a day. North of Brisbane, Montville on the Blackall Range and Eumundi are hinterland villages, with Altitude On Montville, Montville Holiday Apartments and Imperial Boutique Accommodation: village stays, not forest cabins. In Perth, Kings Park covers about 400 ha beside the city centre, nearly two-thirds of it native bush, and John Forrest National Park, reached from Great Eastern Highway, is around half an hour's drive from the CBD in the Perth Hills. Gumleaf Cottage Farmstay at Ellenbrook, a self-catering farm stay with a pool, is a short drive from that park and much closer to a bush stay than Crown Towers, whose view is the Swan River and the casino. For the search that brings most people here, a bush retreat in NSW, the obvious move is the Blue Mountains, about two hours by train from Sydney Central to Katoomba. At the foot of the range, Euroka Hideaway in Glenbrook sits near Jellybean Pool and the bushland of Glenbrook Park, though it has only two reviews so far. Skip these five hotels if you want a fire pit and no neighbours: a national park lodge in one of these ranges will serve you far better.
Campervan Park
Well-equipped caravan and campervan parks along scenic coastal routes.
City Stay
Right in the CBD, steps from everything.