The Most Spectacular Off-the-Grid Hotels, Where Privacy Is the Main Event

Luxury hotels once treated remoteness as a problem to solve. The number that matters most in luxury travel right now is the guest count—how many people a property will take at once—and at the top of the market, it keeps shrinking toward one. The whole-property buyout, renting an entire island, lodge or wilderness estate for a single group, has gone from eccentric request to the way the upper echelon prefers to move, with a handful of private islands now quoting six figures a night for the privilege of turning everyone else away. It is happening in the places the map goes silent—a granite outcrop in the Namib, a glacier shelf beneath Denali—rather than in the usual clichés. The appetite is for space and silence, and for the increasingly scarce sensation of being somewhere the rest of the world cannot casually reach.

What is more novel, and much more compelling, is what the best of these places do with all that seclusion. The lodge that headlines this list operates as a nonprofit and routes its profits to a First Nations recovery center just a boat ride away. A Panamanian archipelago bought all 14 of its islands, built on one and powered the entire operation off the largest off-grid solar array in the country. A Cambodian hotel leased a corridor of rainforest for the express purpose of keeping the chainsaws out. Remoteness is a great deal easier to justify when the property is also protecting the thing that makes it worth the trip.

The 15 getaways that follow are the most beautiful, hard-to-reach rooms on earth at the moment, and the journey is the point. Getting in takes a seaplane, a glacier landing, a 90-minute speedboat with a cooler of champagne, or, in one case, a 1,300-foot zip line over a waterfall. The wifi thins. The guest count drops to single digits. And the sense so much travel has misplaced—of having truly gone somewhere rather than merely relocated—comes flooding back.