Amangiri vs Taj Aravali Resort & Spa, Udaipur

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.

Book the villa, not the brand name. Taj Aravali sits on a 40-acre hillside outside Udaipur, and when it works, it's the space that sells it: Luxury Pool Villas with private plunge pools, traditional cottages with verandahs looking at jungle and hills, an amphitheater lawn kids can run laps on. Staff who get it right go well beyond the job. One guest's room came with a broken fridge, peeling paint and a dirty kettle; Hanumant personally moved them and stayed on it until the replacement room actually worked. Ritesh and Vardhan swapped a booked room for a kid-friendly one, unprompted by any complaint, once they clocked a family was traveling with a toddler.

The trouble is what happens when the desk, not a name, is doing the work. A no-reservation arrival waited 45 minutes without so much as a glass of water while other guests got welcome drinks a few feet away. A family checking out after a hotel wedding sat with packed bags for two and a half hours before a bellboy showed up, after ten-plus calls to housekeeping. One anniversary booking arrived to no cake and no decorated room despite an email confirming both in advance. Food is the weak link across the board: Tiri's buffet gets called basic or overpriced more than once, refills lag at breakfast, and high tea is a paid add-on that surprises people used to it being included at this level.

None of this is occasional bad luck, it's what happens when the property is at capacity for a wedding or a summer weekend, and Udaipur has real alternatives nearby if food and precision matter more to you than acreage. Come for the villa, the hills, and staff like Hanumant and Ritesh who'll actually fix things if you ask, not for a flawless check-in.