Aman Venice vs Amangiri

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.

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.