The most impressive new resorts in the U.S. right now

From a Connecticut inn ending a 100-year hotel drought to a Montana wilderness resort with a private gondola and a butler for every guest

Credit: Snake River Sporting Club

American hospitality keeps raising its own bar. The properties opening across the country in 2025 and 2026 reflect a range of regional identities: the white-painted colonial architecture of northwest Connecticut, the frontier-inflected mountain towns of western Montana, the historic neighborhood fabric of coastal South Carolina, the private wilderness of rural Georgia, and the luxury resort corridor of Wyoming’s Jackson Hole. Travel Leisure editors and reporters visited and reviewed each property on this list, assessing them as part of the magazine’s 2026 It List. The through-line across all six is a conviction that American travel does not require leaving the country to feel genuinely transported: the right property, in the right landscape, can produce the sense of arrival that international travel has historically claimed as its exclusive territory.

The range of formats represented here is as significant as the range of locations. A 31-key historic house in a small Connecticut town operates on entirely different logic from a 240-acre Montana wilderness resort with private gondola access to ski terrain. A rooftop bar and residential-style suites in Charleston share little with four all-inclusive cabins on a Georgia family estate that has been a cattle ranch, a hunting preserve, and a working farm. What unites them is editorial judgment: each property earned its inclusion by delivering an experience that T L’s reporters found memorable and worth recommending.

These six properties come from Travel Leisure’s 2026 It List of the best new resorts in the United States, which spans six states and a diverse range of property formats, landscapes, and price points from a 31-key Connecticut inn to a 240-acre Montana wilderness resort, with two Georgia properties, one Wyoming, and one South Carolina, and one Wyoming across the full geographic range in between.

1. Belden House and Mews ended a hotel drought in Litchfield

Belden House and Mews in Litchfield, Connecticut, opened in spring 2025 as the town's first luxury hotel in over 100 years. The 31-key property is on a row of white clapboard homes, minutes from the town center, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. Two hours from New York City, Litchfield is a well-established destination for the sophisticated New England weekend, surrounded by hundreds of miles of hiking trails and classic inland landscapes. The hotel’s location in that context — discreet, residential, historically-scaled — reflects a deliberate aesthetic choice about what kind of building belongs in a town such as this one.

Champalimaud Design transformed the interior of the 1888 house, where its founder, Alexandra Champalimaud, lives in Litchfield. The firm preserved the building’s original architectural details: fireplaces, chandeliers, sconces, and woodwork all remain, layered with custom wallcoverings, striped fabrics, and warm velvets that bring the spaces forward without erasing what was already there. The public rooms are the original dining and living rooms, with bay windows that fill the spaces with natural light throughout the day. A 50-foot pool and manicured gardens extend the experience to the grounds.

Chef Tyler Heckman sources the kitchen from nearby farms, orchards, and Connecticut’s Atlantic waters, giving the food a regional specificity that matches the building’s commitment to its place. The electric green bar is the standout interior moment in the building, and the spa........

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