Hotel Sacher Salzburg

Hotel Sacher Salzburg commands one of Austria's finest urban prospects: from its bank of the Salzach, the windows frame the domes and spires of the baroque old town rising to the Hohensalzburg fortress. Established in the nineteenth century as the Österreichischer Hof and later brought into the Sacher family's fold, it shares ownership and standards with its famous Viennese sibling, including the original Sacher-Torte served with ceremony in its café.

The interiors are unapologetically classical—chandeliers, oil paintings, floral silks—kept fresh by a family that reinvests continually and knows its clientele. Rooms facing the river are the ones to book; waking to the fortress view across the water is the definitive Salzburg experience. Festival-goers treat the hotel as an institution, and during the summer Salzburg Festival its bar and restaurants become the town's green room, thick with conductors and sopranos.

Dining spreads across a riverside terrace, a grill and the wood-panelled Zirbelzimmer, with the café handling the torte trade. The old town's Getreidegasse and Mozart landmarks are minutes across the bridge. It is not a design statement and does not want to be: this is Salzburg hospitality as the festival crowd has always known it, done properly.