Amanfayun vs Aman Venice

What you're paying for at Amanfayun isn't the room. It's a reconstructed Longjing tea village strung along a stream beside Lingyin Temple, with monk-led chants at Yongfu at dawn and a footpath gate that lets you beat the tour buses. That setting is the whole case for the property, and travellers keep describing it the same way years apart: the stream-lined pool against centuries-old stone, the tea gardens, the sense of arriving somewhere old rather than merely nice. Guest after guest names the same staff by first name, unprompted, and mentions the same soft spot for grandparents and toddlers.

The rooms are the catch, and it's not a minor one: the "cottages" are consistently reported as too dark, by fans and critics alike, in reviews years apart, so this isn't one bad villa. Dining is genuinely strong at the vegetarian restaurant and the in-house Steam House, but Hangzhou House (the Michelin-starred restaurant on property, run separately from Aman) draws a real split — some call it among the best hotel meals in China, others paid roughly SGD 350 for two and found the food bland and the service checked-out. Service overall skews warm and attentive, but there's a genuine minority of accounts describing poor English and dismissive front desk staff, including one detailed 2024 report of serious lapses that reads as an outlier against years of warm accounts, not the rule. Worth noting too: the public footpath means non-guests wander the grounds, which undercuts the sense of exclusivity you'd expect at this price.

Book it for the temple access and the atmosphere, not for a polished five-star room experience — and budget the transfer time, since the traffic-controlled West Lake area makes arrival genuinely complicated.

Palazzo Papadopoli is doing almost all the work here, and it's worth saying plainly: no other hotel in Venice has original Tiepolo ceilings over the breakfast tables and a walled private garden a few steps from the Grand Canal. That's not marketing, it's the building. Guests keep describing breakfast in the frescoed ballroom as one of the best things they've done in the city, and multiple travellers unprompted call the service among the strongest anywhere in the Aman network, up to and including a lost bag chased down by staff without being asked twice.

The catch is room category, and it's not a small one. Entry-level rooms get Aman's stripped-back minimalism with none of the frescoes or gilding that make the story work, and more than one guest has described being assigned an oddly placed or partly subterranean room despite paying well over €1,000 a night. Book below a fresco or canal-facing suite and you're paying palazzo prices for a room that could be a well-made hotel anywhere. The spa is the other soft spot — small to begin with, and one detailed account this year described a genuinely alarming massage experience and a dismissive response from spa management, which lines up with the wider pattern of it being underbuilt for a property at this rate. Dining draws real praise for the setting and the staff, less for the food itself being destination-level, and extras (a lunch here ran well into three figures for two) add up fast.

It's also not built for children or a resort-style stay; families consistently point elsewhere for that. Book the right room, skip the spa, and this is genuinely special. Book wrong and you'll wonder what you paid for.