Aman Kyoto vs Amangiri

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.

The reason to go is still the arrival: up the stairs, through a picture-frame window that opens onto the canyon, an entrance that guests on their fifth and sixth visit still say nothing else in the country matches. The building genuinely disappears into the Colorado Plateau rather than sitting on it, the estate is vast enough that even repeat guests feel like they've crossed into another world, and the excursions built around that landscape (via ferrata, slot canyons, Lake Powell, stargazing) get named as the actual point of the trip, not an add-on. Camp Sarika's pavilions, with their private plunge pools, come up constantly as some of the best rooms of their kind in the US, and the spa is close to the one thing nobody argues about.

Everything else comes with an asterisk. Rates have run from roughly $1,000-2,500 a night a decade ago to $4,500-10,000+ now, often $30k+ for a long weekend with excursions and dining added, and a lot of longtime guests say the place hasn't changed to match. The dining room is the recurring complaint: two-hour dinners, one person running the pool bar, wrong orders, and the food itself splits hard between "Michelin-level" and bland with underripe fruit and undercooked potatoes, sometimes from guests visiting the same season. Gate and reservations staff read as cold more often than they should, a rough first note before anyone's parked the car. Guests since late 2025 credit new Camp Sarika leadership with tightening up dinner service; we haven't stayed to see it ourselves.

Worth booking if the desert, the climbing, and the seclusion are the trip, not the dining room. Travellers chasing round-the-clock polish tend to look at Sedona instead, but nothing there gives you this landscape. Go for the canyon and the pavilions, and don't build the trip around the restaurant.