Side by side Aman Venice vs Waldorf Astoria Los Cabos Pedregal

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.

You're paying anywhere from $2,000 to $3,000 a night here, or burning around 200,000 Hilton points plus a free-night certificate for the same room, and what arrives is a butler who texts back in two minutes, a plunge pool on your own balcony, and an arrival through a tunnel cut into the rock that people still mention years later. One guest's butler, Eloy, picked them up for every off-site dinner and kept the chips, guacamole and Coronitas coming like clockwork; that kind of attention is the real case for booking this over almost anything else in Cabo.

The catch is what's on property to eat. El Farallon's cliffside setting over crashing waves is genuinely dramatic, but more than one guest has described the kitchen as slow and the food as merely fine for the price, and a full week here can mean running out of good options fast since there's really only a handful of restaurants. The ocean here isn't swimmable either, so the plunge pools and resort pools are doing all the work, and the beach rocks mean most people just stay on property or walk the ten minutes into town for dinner. The spa's three-waterfall pool is reserved for guests actually booking treatments, which catches people off guard, and the gym, despite its size, is stocked with equipment regular lifters find underwhelming.

Book this for the service and the privacy, not for a food-forward trip or a swim-in-the-ocean vacation. Couples and points travelers get the most out of it: it's quiet, exclusive, and the staff treat you like you've been coming for years even on your first stay. Families with very young kids may find Four Seasons Punta Mita or Montage Los Cabos a better fit given their broader kids' programming, but for a romantic long weekend from the West Coast, this is still the move.