Nobu Hotels Review 2026: Record Score of 60, 20 Hotels and No Points Programme

Nobu Hotels is last of the twenty brands on our luxury hotel brand hierarchy, at 60 out of 100: 20 hotels open and 27 more marked "Coming Soon" run by Nobu Hospitality under co-founders Chef Nobu Matsuhisa, Robert De Niro and Meir Teper, with no points programme and no room rates published outside each hotel's own booking engine. This record is the evidence file behind that score. It sets out what Nobu Hotels publishes about itself, how Forbes Travel Guide and the MICHELIN Guide rate the Nobu hotels we could read, what could not be found, and where our other pages and Nobu's own figures disagree.

Verified 26 September 2026 · nobuhotels.com (home, hotel collection, our story, residences, privacy policy and property pages) · Forbes Travel Guide · the MICHELIN Guide · our luxury hotel brand hierarchy of 7 September 2026

How Nobu Hotels scores: 60 out of 100

Nobu Hotels scores 60 out of 100, last of twenty brands: full marks for food and drink, 16 of 25 for consistency across the portfolio, 11 of 20 for privacy and scale, 10 of 20 for service depth and 8 of 20 for rate band. The points are the luxury hotel brand hierarchy's of 7 September 2026, carried unchanged; under each criterion is what we could read on 26 September 2026. None of it contradicts a figure the hierarchy prints, though Nobu's own pages name no head office and no founding year, and only one of the fourteen Nobu hotels the MICHELIN Guide lists holds a Key.

Nobu Hotels publishes who founded it and who runs it day to day, and lists its open and Coming Soon hotels on one page. It publishes little else a guest could check before booking: no head office address beyond a privacy contact, no founding year, no room count at most of its hotels and no dated press releases. Of the outside ratings we could read, Forbes Travel Guide rates the one Nobu hotel we could open, Nobu Hotel Los Cabos, Four-Star, and the MICHELIN Guide lists 14 Nobu hotels and gives a Key to one, Nobu Hotel Atlanta.

The evidence record

The record holds 18 facts about Nobu Hotels, each with its source and grade. Grade A means the company's own site or terms; grade B means a rating body such as Forbes Travel Guide or the MICHELIN Guide, a registry or major press; grade C means a secondary source not confirmed elsewhere. Every line was read on 26 September 2026 unless its source says otherwise.

Who owns Nobu Hotels?

Nobu Hotels is run by Nobu Hospitality, whose home page names Chef Nobu Matsuhisa, Robert De Niro and Meir Teper as its co-founders, with Trevor Horwell as Chief Executive Officer and Struan Mckenzie as Chief Operating Officer.

No stock listing was found on any Nobu page we opened. No founding year is printed either: the our story page links a "10th Anniversary" article without stating a year, and the hotel collection page lists Las Vegas among its 20 open hotels, but the site's own link for it goes out to Caesars Palace's own page rather than a Nobu page, so no Nobu page we opened gives Las Vegas an opening year.

Two Nobu Residences projects, Los Cabos and Toronto, are marked open on Nobu's own residences page, which prints no unit count for either. Our branded residences index gives Los Cabos 60 homes and Toronto 658 units; neither figure could be confirmed on a Nobu page, so this record treats them as unconfirmed until a source can be opened.

How many hotels does Nobu have?

Nobu counts 20 open hotels on its own hotel collection page, plus 27 more marked "Coming Soon" that open count matches the hierarchy's "about twenty hotels from Malibu to Marrakech." The same page names every Coming Soon location without a date; Bangkok and Cairo each appear twice on it.

Nobu's own count is of hotels, not countries: the hotel collection page gives no country total, and our own count of the 20 open hotels spans nine countries, from the United States and Canada to Poland and the Philippines. A resort in the Maldives is among the Coming Soon names; how Maldives resorts compare on scale and privacy is in Maldives overwater villa guide. Whether a guest should book a hotel in its first season is weighed in should you book a brand-new luxury hotel, and how residence programmes score against each other, including Nobu Residences, is in branded residences index.

How Nobu's hotels are rated by Forbes Travel Guide and the MICHELIN Guide

The one Nobu hotel we could read on Forbes Travel Guide, Nobu Hotel Los Cabos, is Four-Star, and of the 14 Nobu hotels the MICHELIN Guide lists, only one, Nobu Hotel Atlanta, holds a Key.

Forbes Travel Guide grades hotels Recommended, Four-Star or Five-Star, and the MICHELIN Guide gives one to three Keys to the hotels it selects; neither listing we read prints the year of an award. No Nobu page we opened lists awards, so every rating here comes from the rating body's own page: Nobu Hotel Los Cabos on Forbes Travel Guide, and the MICHELIN Guide's own listings for Atlanta, Barcelona, Chicago, London Portman Square and Marbella, plus its Los Cabos city listing, which shows Nobu Hotel Los Cabos with no Key. Nobu Ryokan Malibu and Nobu Hotel Miami Beach do not appear in the MICHELIN Guide's listings at all, and their Forbes Travel Guide pages, along with Nobu Hotel Chicago's, each redirected to the Forbes home page rather than showing a rating.

How to book Nobu Hotels, and whether any perks come with it

Nobu runs no points programme on any page we opened, matching the hierarchy's "None" a stay is booked through each hotel's own reservations rather than a shared loyalty scheme.

No Nobu page names American Express Fine Hotels + Resorts or Virtuoso as a partner, and its FAQ page returned no content to our reader. The adviser and card routes other brands offer are set out in Direct vs Amex FHR vs Virtuoso; general travel cards are compared in our guide to the best luxury travel credit cards, two of the leading premium cards against each other in Amex Platinum vs Chase Sapphire Reserve, and a card built to fast-track chain status, in the best credit cards for hotel elite status fast-track, buys nothing at a brand that runs no status of its own.

For a traveller who collects points, that is the trade: no Nobu page we opened offers points or chain status, as with Aman. The chain programmes that do carry status are compared in Hilton Diamond vs Marriott Titanium vs Hyatt Globalist and the hotel status match guide, and the case for booking the best hotel over the best points is made in you do not owe any brand your loyalty.

Who Nobu Hotels suits, and who it does not

Nobu suits a traveller who wants the Nobu name and its restaurants inside the hotel, without chain status or a published rate; it suits less well anyone who wants a MICHELIN Key at most of its hotels, a confirmed staff ratio or Michelin-starred dining.

Its city hotels vary in scale, from 115 rooms in Chicago to 259 in Barcelona, next to the 16-room Nobu Ryokan Malibu; city trips more widely are weighed in best city break destinations. What a hotel front desk records about a guest, whatever the brand, is set out in hotel check-in privacy.

When a Nobu Hotels stay is not available, the nearest brands on the hierarchy are EDITION, Waldorf Astoria, The Ritz-Carlton and St. Regis, covered in their own records below.

Nobu Hotels: the decisions that come next

Which brand, whether to wait for one of the 27 Coming Soon hotels, how to book and whether Nobu Residences is worth the unconfirmed numbers are the next decisions, and each has its own page here.

Where Nobu Hotels stands on Uncompromised Travel

Nobu Hotels appears on two Uncompromised Travel pages with a position or a figure, and holds a numbered rank, No. 20 of 20, on one of them.

Alternatives to Nobu Hotels to compare

The nearest brands on the same rubric are the four scored just above Nobu Hotels: EDITION, Waldorf Astoria, The Ritz-Carlton and St. Regis.

What this record does not show

Eight things a guest would want could not be found or verified for Nobu Hotels. Supplying a verifiable source closes a gap; it changes the evidence, never the rubric.

What changed at Nobu Hotels, 2025 to 2026

No Nobu page dates its own changes; the Madrid opening, the one MICHELIN Key and the Forbes rating we could read carry no day of their own, so they are dated to when we read them.