From Swedish snow to Costa Rican surf, here are the spots that Tablet Hotels recommends for a holiday chill-out.

If you’re like us, you begin every autumn with good intentions about planning a holiday. Then you find yourself waiting for some sort of sign, be it a pay rise or that greenish-hued version of yourself staring back from the shaving mirror, to spur you into action. But even if you have left it to this impossibly late date, don’t panic. We at Tablet Hotels are here to help.

Back in 2000, we opened Tablet Hotels as a hotel curation/ booking site for jaded travellers. Before launching the site, Mr Laurent Vernhes’ career in business had taken him from his native France to living in seven countries on three continents and Mr Michael Davis had been working on the creative side of e-commerce at the Razorfish agency and with the hotelier Mr Ian Schrager. In the mid-1990s we noticed that for the first time since the gilded age of the grand old dames, hotels were becoming interesting places for design, food and culture. And the insight prompted us to create a site for people in search of a cure for boring travel, and an antidote to the internet’s most common affliction: an overdose of options.

We keep the list tidy by having scouts visit hotels anonymously and report back for final selection. Hotels only stay on the site if they’re making users happy. Only real Tablet guests are allowed to submit reviews, and we remove any hotel with a less than stellar rating or a less than competitive price. So, where to go?

Mr Vernhes spent countless weekends in remote beach shacks in southeast Asia in his younger days, so he knows a bit about beaches, and Playa Guiones is one of the best surf beaches in the world. The waves just keep coming, every day, all year long. The “inside” is wide enough for beginners to have a go. The “outside” is challenging, and there are many chances for “tubos” [surfing inside the barrel of a breaking wave]. The beach is vast, and pretty much untouched, and the hotel is about as close to it as you can get. The locals have been arguing for years about whether to pave the roads, because they’re afraid it will open the door to mass tourism. So it gets dusty during the dry season, and you can’t get anywhere fast, but you can walk everywhere you need to go. For a great meal, try La Luna on Playa Pelada, which is walking distance from Playa Guiones.

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If you’ve already toured the vineyards around Mendoza in Argentina, with the Andes in the background, it’s time to see them from the other side, in South America’s other great wine-growing region. Owners Mr Alexander and Mrs Carrie Vik already had a couple of very good small hotels in Uruguay, near Punta del Este, but they seem to have set their sights a bit higher in recent years. Viña Vik is a small hotel in terms of the number of rooms, but there’s something almost monumental about it. The Viks have always been fans of modern architecture and this hotel looks like something from another planet that’s landed in the middle of a Chilean vineyard. They are also huge fans of contemporary art, and Viña Vik’s artwork puts most hotel collections to shame.

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Mr Vernhes collects desert experiences. He took his eldest son to Namibia as soon as he was old enough for them to travel together and remember it as an adult, and he hopes Oman is coming soon. It’s the complete opposite of the high-rise, air-conditioned, luxury-shopping experience of a place like Dubai, which is Disneyland compared to this, the real Arabia. The rocky desert mountains of Oman are among the world’s most amazing landscapes. And the Alila group knows what it’s doing, not only with the locations, which are usually phenomenal, but with the hotels themselves, too.

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The hotel business depends, in a way, on architects, and many great architects have designed hotels or hotel buildings, including Mr Geoffrey Bawa. He was the father of Sri Lankan modernist architecture and a master of concrete, strange as that may sound. Heritance Kandalama is his most spectacular hotel, thanks to the way the building connects with the site, on a cliff alongside a man-made lake.

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For a classic European skiing holiday, we can’t improve on the words of our colleague Mr Dante Nolleau, editor of the French edition of Tablet, “This former hunting lodge, lost in the mountains in the middle of nowhere, is the best place on earth to enjoy a life of simple pleasures and connect back to what’s really important in life – watching the winter snow melt in an outdoor panoramic Jacuzzi, listening to Edith Piaf tunes in a Turkish bath with a chromotherapy system, sharing Italian reds from the owner’s private wine cellar with your best friends, eating wild boar roasted in the chimney. All of these quite possibly naked or wearing animal skins.”

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Koalas, glass walls, Aussie wine, a tiny environmental footprint and dramatic coastal vistas – what’s not to like? It’s all about the explorer-by-day-luxury-by-night vibe. Mr Davis is drawn to hotels that take care with the architecture, and we love the contrast between Southern Ocean Lodge’s ultra-clean design and the slightly rustic, reclaimed materials that echo the rugged landscape outside. In a hotel as remote as this, you’re at the mercy of the chef when it comes to food and wine, but the culinary scene in this part of the world is in great shape – and if there’s one nation we trust with our coffee, it’s Australia.

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Despite our dislike of the cold, we fantasise about holing up in Görvälns Slott in the middle of winter. Images from the beginning of Ingmar Bergman’s film Fanny and Alexander come to mind. For too long, the world’s most style-conscious hotels were a little bit afraid of colour, but here it’s back in a big way in the playful, gold-heavy decor – it has to help during those long, dark Scandinavian winters. The Swedes know how to survive and even celebrate winter, and we want to learn from them. The restaurant is great, so there’s no reason at all to go out, but if you do there is a reindeer-pulled sleigh. And perhaps with the help of some aquavit, you could even be persuaded to do the traditional post-sauna naked roll in the snow.

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