Side by side Amanpuri vs Capella Lodge

Amanpuri is the original Aman, built in 1988, and it still runs like one: villas get tidied every single time you leave them, staff remember which tea you drink by day two, and the beach is the calmest stretch of sand on this part of the island, shared only with the Surin next door. That's the case, and it's a strong one.

The catch is what you're booking into. The entry-level rooms don't get you the real Amanpuri experience — multiple people who've stayed say the pool villas and above are where the brand actually delivers, and anything less feels like visiting without being invited in. One guest ended up in a villa reached by over a hundred steps with no buggy offered until she complained; the resort does run an electric buggy fleet that shows up in under a minute if you ask, but you have to know to ask. The food is good rather than thrilling: three restaurants (Thai, Japanese, Italian) cover the bases, but more than one long-stay guest got bored of the rotation by day four or five, and this is not a beach-resort stay in the Six Senses or Rosewood sense, so don't book it expecting a full beach-club scene.

None of that changes who this is for. Go for the privacy, the Pansea Beach setting, and service that genuinely anticipates rather than performs: pick a pool villa or higher, give it three to five nights, and skip the wet-season closure between May and September. Couples and honeymooners get the most out of it; families can make it work, but keep the kids in check around other diners. Book it for the beach and the quiet, and choose your room category with intent.

Nine rooms sit on a bluff on Lord Howe Island with nothing between you and Mt Gower and Mt Lidgbird, and almost nobody who stays here leaves without saying the view alone would have been worth the trip. The island only allows a few hundred visitors at a time, so Capella already has a kind of built-in quiet. What makes it more than a nice view is the way it's run: when one couple got stranded by cancelled flights and bad weather, the lodge managers sorted another night and found them seats on the next available flight out, and that kind of problem-solving shows up constantly in how people describe their stay here. Breakfast, dinner, evening canapes and cocktails are all included, and the kitchen changes the dinner menu nightly rather than running a fixed rotation.

The trade-offs are narrow but real. One guest who'd just come off seven nights at a nearby luxury lodge found Capella's dinner service a letdown by comparison and felt the package didn't justify the cost that week, so the kitchen isn't bulletproof every night. The pool is small (there are only a couple on the whole island, so context helps), and the e-bike fleet runs short when the lodge is full. The rooms themselves are plain good rather than showstopping next to the setting around them: comfortable, well-finished, but it's the mountains and the staff doing the heavy lifting, not the architecture.

Book it for the Lidgbird Pavilion if you can get it, for a kitchen that doesn't repeat itself, and for a team that treats a cancelled flight as their problem to fix rather than yours. This is a place for people who want the island to be the whole trip, not a lodge you duck out of for nightlife, because there isn't any, and that's the point.