There’s something quietly thrilling about sleeping in a building that has already lived several lives. Not a building designed to feel historic, but one that actually was a prison, a brewery, a railway station or a royal abbey before anyone thought to put a bed in it. That’s exactly what a growing number of travelers are choosing, and the search numbers show they’re not slowing down.
Expedia Group tracks this as Salvaged Stays, its standout hotel trend for the year, and the data is hard to ignore. Searches for hotels in converted historic buildings have surged year over year, with some properties recording triple-digit growth. Ground-up hotel construction has stalled in many markets, which means the most interesting new inventory isn’t new at all.
From holding cells to hotel rooms
Bodmin Jail Hotel in Cornwall is exactly what it sounds like. The Grade II-listed Georgian prison dates to 1779, held 55 executions (the last in 1909) and didn’t close until 1927. A £70 million restoration turned it into 70 rooms carved from three former cells, with original stone walls and inmate graffiti intact. Guests choose from the Prisoner, Warden or Governor Experience.
In New York City, Nine Orchard Hotel occupies the 1912 Jarmulowsky Bank on the Lower East Side. The teller hall is now the Swan Room cocktail lounge, pink Tennessee marble floors and all. Bodmin saw +110% year-over-year search growth; Nine Orchard was up +23%.
Platforms with a second departure
Union Station Nashville Yards opened as a railroad terminal in 1900 and earned back-to-back spots on the Historic Hotels of America Best of Adaptive Reuse list for 2024 and 2025. Its barrel-vaulted ceiling and stained-glass windows are still the first thing guests see. In Spain, Canfranc Estación was once one of Europe’s largest international railway stations, sat abandoned for over 50 years and now has 104 rooms and a Michelin-starred restaurant.
Sacred ground, colonial walls
Fontevraud L’Ermitage in France’s Loire Valley puts guests inside a 12th-century royal abbey where Eleanor of Aquitaine and Richard the Lionheart are buried, with after-midnight access to the grounds. In Paraty, Brazil, Sandi Hotel sits in a UNESCO World Heritage town so well-preserved it barely looks like it left the Portuguese colonial era. Fontevraud searches rose +71%; Sandi was up +72%.
Workhorse buildings worth checking into
The most searched property on the entire Hotels.com list wasn’t a palace. It was a school. Hotel Seiryu Kyoto Kiyomizu occupies a 1933 elementary school that closed in 2011 and reopened in 2020 with 48 rooms and a lounge where the auditorium used to be.
Searches for Hotel Seiryu jumped +194%, the highest on the entire list. Sydney’s The Old Clare Hotel stitches together a former brewery headquarters and a pub that’s been part of the neighborhood since 1940. The original boardroom is now the CUB Suite, heritage paneling, chandelier and all. If these are the kinds of places you want to stay, now is a good time to start looking.
Mandy is a luxury travel, fine dining and bucket-list-adventure journalist with expert insight from 46 countries. She uncovers unforgettable experiences around the world and brings them to life through immersive storytelling that blends indulgence, culture and discovery, and shares them with a global audience as co-founder of Food Drink Life. Her articles appear on MSN and through the Associated Press wire in major U.S. outlets, including NBC, the Daily News, Boston Herald, the Chicago Sun-Times and many more.