Amanpuri vs Awasi Patagonia

Amanpuri is the original Aman, built in 1988, and what keeps coming up, from first-time guests and people on their fourth or fifth stay, is that the service here still outdoes most of the brand it started: housekeeping that refreshes a villa the moment you step out, staff who remember a tea order or a preferred pillow without being told twice. The beach, shared only with The Surin next door, is the other constant: hosed down, rarely crowded, and consistently called the calmest stretch of sand on the island. The teak-and-thatch architecture reads as timeless rather than dated for a property closing in on 40 years old, and enough people single out the gym — two floors, a boxing ring, a full Muay Thai setup — that it clearly isn't a throwaway amenity for a beach resort.

The catch is what you book. Anything below a pool or ocean villa loses the plot fast, and guests say so bluntly. The hillside villas (18 and 19 specifically) come with genuinely brutal staircases; a buggy fleet solves it for most people, but one guest was put in a room 170 steps from the lobby with no cart available and ended up asking for a refund on the remaining nights, so it's worth asking about step count directly when you book. Dining draws a mixed verdict against Trisara nearby: solid, occasionally very good, but rarely what people book the trip for, and at these rates a few guests wanted more. A handful of recent reviews also flag family-heavy villa bookings, with unsupervised children disrupting the quieter, adults-leaning mood Aman built its name on.

The Surin sits on the same beach for less, and people who've stayed at both still give Amanpuri the edge on service and grounds. Book the room category that matches the price and this stays the Aman most repeat guests call their favorite.

No one else in Torres del Paine gives you a private guide and private vehicle per villa. Stay at Explora or Tierra and you're on a shared group itinerary; at Awasi, guests describe their guide rerouting the whole day around wind and light, sketching geology lessons on a whiteboard over lunch, or turning up with borrowed fishing gear because someone mentioned liking to fish. With only 14 to 15 villas and cedar-and-stone architecture that sits into the hillside instead of announcing itself, the guiding is the reason to pick this over the bigger lodges nearby — and the staff names recur constantly across years of reviews, which says as much about the management as the individuals.

There was a real stretch through 2024 and into early 2025 when the guiding and the management behind it slipped badly enough that Awasi brought in a new CEO and, for the first time, a permanent year-round GM rather than a seasonal one. Stays from spring 2025 onward read close to flawless again, though a couple of guests as recently as May 2026 still describe getting stuck with a weak guide before switching, so the fix isn't unanimous, even if it's clearly held for most people. The hot tub situation is a genuine coin flip: some guests use theirs nightly regardless of wind, even in the newer piped-heat villas, while others lose most of a four-night stay to it. Food is good, occasionally excellent (guanaco tartare, an all-Chilean list), but defaults to heavy and simple unless you specifically ask for off-menu.

Book it for the guiding and the privacy, not for a guaranteed soak or a spa afternoon. Budget for real drive time to the trailheads, sometimes over an hour each way, and expect the heli and seaplane add-ons to be the only real extras on an otherwise all-inclusive bill.