Amangiri vs Soneva Jani

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 one-bedroom water retreat here runs well over $3,000 a night before you touch the extras, and what arrives for it is genuinely one of the largest villas in the Maldives: 400-plus square metres, a private pool, a retractable roof over the bed that opens straight to the stars, and a slide off the deck into the lagoon that every kid (and most adults) treats as the main event. The staff are the reason people rebook: guests describe a Barefoot Guardian who sent a doctor over for a sunburn within minutes, and a butler who knew the island's history well enough to answer any question without being asked twice. The food gets called out by name, dish by dish, from an in-villa omakase lunch to a chef who quietly restocked a table with dishes that weren't on the buffet at all.

None of that erases what a run of 2025-26 stays actually found on arrival: mould in fittings, weathered decking, lights that didn't work, and an AC that struggled on hot nights. One family paid roughly $40,000 for six nights and left after two, citing a limited menu and a distant, seagrass-choked lagoon; a fire took out The Gathering, the wooden building that held most of the restaurants and the best gym, and renovation work has left construction visible from parts of the island. The lagoon itself is the trade worth knowing about going in: spectacular to look at, weak for snorkelling, since there's no house reef and you'll need a boat to find real coral. Half-board runs close to $250 a person a day, which only pencils out if you'd otherwise be paying $600 for dinner alone.

This is a house for families and repeat guests who want space, privacy and a genuinely warm team, not a honeymoon pick if quiet and reef access matter more than square footage. Book it for the villa and the people who run it, and go in expecting the odd rough edge on the building itself.