Amangiri vs Aman New York

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.

A base room here (Deluxe Suite, roughly 725 square feet) runs from about $1,100 to $3,500 a night depending on season, and what arrives for that is real: Jean-Michel Gathy's dark, warm interiors, a working fireplace, and soundproofing so good you can watch a fire truck go by outside and hear nothing. The building itself, the 1921 Crown Building on 57th Street, is one of the best-designed hotel shells in the city, and the three-floor spa with its Banya and Hammam suites gets more genuine enthusiasm from guests than almost anything else on the property, cold plunge terraces and all.

Where it gets complicated is everything Aman built its name on outside the room. Several guests who've stayed at other Amans describe a butler service that's advertised but doesn't really exist, a concierge that lost a scheduled dinner reservation entirely, and a front desk that can feel like a well-run five-star chain rather than the anticipatory, name-remembering service the brand promises elsewhere. One couple celebrating a tenth anniversary got a chaotic, unresolved checkout after a lobby flooding issue; another found the pool disappointingly cold with no complimentary access to the cold plunge or jacuzzi unless you book the paid Banya treatment. The food is consistently described as good but not memorable, which stings less in a city with this many restaurants but still doesn't match the price tag.

Book it if you want a quiet, beautifully built room to retreat to in Midtown and you're not counting on Aman's resort-level hand-holding to show up. The rooms alone justify a stay for anyone who values a genuinely soundproofed, well-finished space over a livelier boutique address. If personal recognition and a fully realized butler relationship are the point of paying Aman prices, that's inconsistent here. Go for the room and the spa.