Hotels for Boston Marathon 2027

The Boston Marathon is one of the world's most prestigious running events, drawing elite athletes and hundreds of thousands of spectators to Boston's streets each April. Your choice of base matters: you'll want easy access to the race route, post-race areas, and the buzz of Marathon Monday without fighting crowds for transport.

The Boston Marathon is the world's oldest annual marathon, first run in 1897 and inspired by the marathon at the revived Olympic Games in Athens the year before. Organised by the Boston Athletic Association and held every year on Patriots' Day, the third Monday of April, it is a point-to-point race that starts in the town of Hopkinton and runs east through a chain of Massachusetts towns to a finish on Boylston Street in the Back Bay.

Its most notorious feature is the series of Newton hills late in the race, the last of them nicknamed Heartbreak Hill, while the roar of Wellesley College students forms the famous 'scream tunnel' near halfway. Unusually, most runners must post a qualifying time to enter, which gives a place on the start line a special cachet.

The race was officially closed to women until 1972, some years after Kathrine Switzer's celebrated 1967 run; today it is one of the seven Abbott World Marathon Majors and a bucket-list goal for club runners the world over.