Preferred Hotels & Resorts Launches a Grand Touring Escape Through the Alps
Shereen Shabnam
There are luxury hotel brands that understand comfort, and then there are those that understand how a destination should feel. The finest hospitality experiences do more than provide a suite, a spa, or a tasting menu. They curate a sense of place. Increasingly, that includes how guests move through the landscape itself.
With the launch of The Preferred Experience, Preferred Hotels & Resorts has recognised something many motoring enthusiasts like myself have known for years: some roads deserve to be driven properly.
Created in partnership with InRadius, the five-day Alpine programme, debuting in July 2026, blends high-performance driving with a handpicked collection of exceptional hotels across Germany and Austria. It is a concept that speaks directly to travellers who appreciate both engineering and elegance and those who value a perfectly weighted steering wheel as much as impeccable turndown service.
For a motoring journalist, this is exactly the kind of travel concept that feels overdue. Too often, driving experiences are all machine and no soul, while luxury travel can become static and over-curated. Here, the car is not the destination, but the key that unlocks it.
Guests begin in Munich at the legendary Hotel Bayerischer Hof, one of Europe’s great grand hotels. It is a fitting overture: historic, polished, and unmistakably German in its sense of order and prestige. After a welcome dinner and briefing, participants head to Motorworld Munich before collecting their sports cars and pointing them south toward the Alps. Then comes the real theatre.
The route takes in roads that enthusiasts speak about in reverential tones of the Hahntennjoch Pass, the Gerlos Pass, Tyrol’s sweeping mountain tarmac and the scenic drama of Austria’s higher elevations. These are roads built not simply for transport, but for rhythm: second-gear hairpins, long-sighted sweepers, changing gradients, and landscapes so cinematic they can distract from the apex if you are not careful.
Yet what elevates this beyond a supercar tour is what awaits at the end of each stage. Preferred’s selected properties are not interchangeable five-star boxes, but destination hotels with personality. Interalpen-Hotel Tyrol delivers panoramic mountain serenity. IMLAUER Hotel Schloss Pichlarn adds castle grandeur and championship golf. Das Achental, in Bavaria’s Chiemgau region, offers a refined finale with spa, leisure, and a farewell dinner worthy of the roads that preceded it.
Only 20 guests will take part in each departure, preserving the intimacy and exclusivity such an experience demands. This is how luxury motoring travel should be done: not excessive, not superficial, but thoughtfully composed. Great cars, great roads, and great hotels with each enhancing the other.
