Aman Kyoto vs Aman Venice

Aman Kyoto is a 26-room retreat carved into 3.2 hectares of cypress and cedar forest at the foot of Hidari Daimonji, and what you're paying for (rates run roughly 360,000 to 650,000+ yen a night depending on season) is the forest, not the city. The Kerry Hill-designed rooms run 646 square feet with private Hinoki baths, sliding doors that unfold into extra space, and tatami floors that guests keep calling the best-finished wood and tatami they've seen outside a private Japanese home. The onsen, indoor and outdoor, is the reason more than one guest calls this the real onsen hotel in the Aman portfolio, and Taka-An's set menu (six ways with one seasonal ingredient, snow crab when it's in season) gets guests going back a second night.

Two things get priced in honestly. There's no pool and no gym, which a hotel at this rate would normally include as a given, and the wellness sits entirely on the traditional onsen experience instead. And the location is a genuine split: it's 13 to 18 minutes by house car from central Kyoto, which some guests find is exactly the point (a real pull from the crowds around Kinkaku-ji) and others find makes it a poor base if you actually want to spend your days out seeing the city. A few guests also flag that the main dining room is small and breakfast feels modest set against the nightly rate, and one flat-out said the delivery felt closer to a much cheaper property at these prices.

Book it if you want a few days of quiet at the start or end of a Japan trip, ideally paired with something central like the Ritz-Carlton or Park Hyatt for the days you actually want to be in Kyoto proper. If mobility is a concern, know the paths through the grounds are uneven rock, not flat. For the forest, the baths, and Taka-An, nothing else in the city gets close.

Palazzo Papadopoli on the Grand Canal is the reason to book this: original Tiepolo frescoes over the breakfast tables, a private dock so you arrive by boat straight into the courtyard, and two gardens that are close to the only real green space on a private plot in the city. Jean-Michel Gathy's interiors are deliberately restrained against all that 16th-century gilt, and that restraint is exactly where opinions split. The entry-level rooms can read as genuinely bare next to the palazzo shell around them; book a Sansovino Stanza or the Tiepolo Suite if you want the fresco-and-carved-wood version of Aman Venice, because the base rooms don't give you that.

The gaps are real and worth pricing in. One family said their room sat next to the staff offices with a secondary staircase to reception; another guest waited an hour and a half for a sixty-euro pasta dish with no apology. The spa is small, more of an afterthought than a destination, and one guest had a genuinely bad experience there involving reused massage gloves and a shrug from the manager when she raised it. The building never wavers, but the service is not uniformly at the level the room rate implies, and a few recent stays mention front-desk stiffness that doesn't match the warmth guests report from the restaurant and boat staff.

This is a couples' or small-group hotel, not a family resort: the newer Venice openings on Giudecca do gardens and kids' clubs better if that's the trip. For a quiet few nights inside a real Venetian palace, with dinner at Arva and a drink in the library upstairs where almost nobody goes, book it for the palazzo and the garden lunch, nothing else in Venice gets you either.