The HIP Hotels series of guides produced by Herbert Ypma is like no other. They are as luxurious as their subjects. So what qualities make a hotel worthy of inclusion?

Herbert Ypma is the founder of the eminently chic HIP Hotels series. An abbre­viation of Highly Individual Places, HIP Hotels was born after Ypma uncovered a gap in the travel guide market for a more specialized publication: a hand-picked collection of hotels, each a destination in itself featuring stunning photo­graphy as well as in-depth information on every hotel.

According to Ypma, there are any number of qualities that make a hotel unique: “It could be the location alone, the archi­tecture or the food. Some places tick all the boxes; with others it could be a sense that you’ve stumbled across something very special.”

Ypma points to One&Only’s Ocean Club as a hotel that embodies the very concept of HIP Hotels: “The colonial feel is unique to the Bahamas, nowhere else achieves that sense of heritage and One&Only has kept faithfully to the plantation aesthetic. The attention to detail is incredible. There’s also a great beach, which isn’t always a given in the Bahamas.”

But the HIP hotels brand is no longer limited to hotels alone, as Ypma explains: “HIP Hotels has shifted from a collection of hotels to a travel brand. We now know the destin­ations and the people who visit them as well as the hotels, which helps inform our selection. For example, many of the tourists who visit Dubai are from the Middle East, so they aren’t interested in the heat at all. The Europeans, however, go to Dubai to escape the winter.”

Part of the appeal of the HIP Hotels series is the stunning photo­graphy used throughout, taken by Ypma himself. “I try to capture the experience through photo­graphs and words. I won’t spend hours setting up each shot—I’m not a technical photo­grapher, it’s more important to convey a sense of atmosphere. I like to shoot every moment in a day, so I shoot from dawn until dusk, moving through the hotel as a guest would, capturing each area at the appro­priate time—for example, the beach in the morning and the bar at night.”