Best Hotels in Ahmedabad | The Permit, the Pols and the River
Your Ahmedabad hotel does something no hotel anywhere else in India does: it is how you legally get a drink. That is not a joke, it is the licensing system, and it should shape which one you book.
The hotel is how you get a drink
Start with the thing that makes this city's hotel decision genuinely different from every other page on this site.
Gujarat is a dry state. Alcohol is prohibited, it has been for a very long time, and it is not a formality. Restaurants do not serve it. Shops do not sell it. Carrying it in from another state on the assumption that nobody minds is a poor plan.
Visitors from outside the state can generally obtain a permit, and in practice that is most often arranged through a hotel that holds a licensed facility.
Which means your hotel is not just where you sleep. It is the mechanism, and it is the one place in India where that sentence is true.
The rules and the process change, so confirm the current position on an official source rather than trusting this page. What we will say is that this is worth asking us about before you book, because the answer determines which properties are even relevant. Ask us about Ahmedabad.
And the honest counterpoint, which our Ahmedabad travel guide makes at length: a fortnight in Gujarat with no alcohol in it is a genuinely good experience. The evening social life runs on food and chai rather than bars, and Manek Chowk at eleven at night is busier than any pub you have been to.
A business city, which changes the market
Ahmedabad is overwhelmingly a business city, and that shapes everything about where you can stay.
Most of the good properties are built for corporate travellers on the western side, near the offices. They are comfortable, competent and unremarkable, and they are good value because they are competing for a weekday market.
Which produces a useful quirk: rates frequently soften at weekends, which is the exact opposite of a leisure destination. If your dates are flexible, that is worth knowing.
There is very little tourist infrastructure, because there are very few tourists. Ahmedabad was the first city in India to be named a World Heritage City in its entirety and almost no Australian has heard of it, which is the whole argument for going.
The areas
The riverfront and the west. Comfort, restaurants, most of the licensed hotels, and the newer building. This is where most visitors end up and it is a sensible base rather than a destination.
The old city, inside the walls. The interesting choice, and the one we would make.
Near the airport. Rarely necessary. The transfer is manageable rather than a Mumbai-scale expedition.
Stay inside the pols if you can
This is the recommendation worth acting on.
Inside the old walls sits a form of urbanism that exists nowhere else: the pol, a neighbourhood entered through a gateway, houses packed around shared courtyards, carved timber facades, communal bird feeders standing in the courtyards, and secret passages between them.
There are restored heritage properties inside the pols. Small, in old houses, with courtyards.
Staying in one means you can walk those lanes at six in the morning, while the milk arrives and the birds are fed and the city has not started shouting. That is the quietest an Indian city ever gets, and it is the entire reason to come here.
The organised heritage walk that leaves at dawn from a temple in the old city is genuinely good and it is the standard way in. Being there already, before the walk starts, is better.
The kite festival scramble
Mid-January brings Uttarayan, and it is the single best day to be in this city.
The entire city goes onto its roofs from dawn. The sky fills with kites, kite-fighting is conducted as a competitive sport with cut lines, and after dark the kites give way to paper lanterns and it keeps going.
Which means every rooftop in Ahmedabad is spoken for, and a hotel with a usable roof terrace is suddenly the most valuable thing in the city.
Book several months ahead. This is not a festival to stumble into, and it is genuinely worth planning a trip around, as our Adelaide to Ahmedabad, Brisbane to Ahmedabad and Perth to Ahmedabad pages all argue.
The other peaks are the familiar ones: Diwali, and the wedding season from roughly November to February, when Gujarat's weddings pull the diaspora home in blocks and the good rooms go with them.
The heat is the other constraint
November to February is the season and it is not close.
April to June on the Gujarat plains produces some of the most severe heat in inhabited India, and sightseeing simply stops being possible in the middle of the day. Air conditioning is not a preference in those months; it is the whole booking.
July to September is the monsoon, which brings relief and complications.
Late February to March is the value window: the kite festival crowds have gone and the heat has not arrived.
The arrival
There is no non-stop from Australia. Every itinerary uses a hub, most commonly Dubai or Doha, and sometimes Delhi or Mumbai with a domestic sector to finish.
Which hub you use decides what hour you land, and Ahmedabad has very little tourist infrastructure to catch you at three in the morning. Arrange the driver before you fly, and if you are landing in the small hours, book the room from the night before, because a room booked for Tuesday starts on Tuesday afternoon.
Our flights to India page covers the corridor and the routing options.
Two days, and the stepwells
Two days for the city, three if you want the stepwells, and four if you intend to reach the Statue of Unity, which our Ahmedabad guide is honest about.
Adalaj Stepwell, a short drive north, is the thing that will surprise you most: a building that goes five storeys down into the ground in carved sandstone, cool and dim and octagonal. There is no equivalent in Australian architecture and photographs do not prepare you.
Which is a reason to stay somewhere with a car available, and a reason not to over-plan the days.
Rates are good value on a business calendar and impossible around Uttarayan. Get a free Gujarat quote and a consultant will reply within 2 business hours with the flights priced, the arrival hour stated and the festival dates checked.
Booking notes
Prices shown by our partner are live and land in Australian dollars from our links, and free cancellation windows are stated on each listing. Our current hotel partner is Agoda, whose Indian inventory reaches well beyond the international chains into the business hotels around SG Highway and the restored pols of the old city. Its review scores run out of 10 and come only from guests who completed the stay, and eligible bookings earn AgodaCash credit towards the next trip.