Side by side Amanyara vs Shiv Niwas Palace

The pool pavilions are the best room a lot of these travellers say they've ever stayed in: a private infinity pool, an outdoor shower, floor-to-ceiling glass facing a beach that genuinely looks fake in photos. The architecture is the reason people keep coming back after fifteen years of visits. If you book nothing else, book the setting: 18,000 acres of nature reserve, a reef close enough to swim to, and a level of privacy that holds even at full occupancy.

Where it gets complicated is everything around the room. The food is the most consistent complaint: two restaurants total, a $160 steak more than one guest said didn't taste like beef, $50 salads, and long waits even when the resort isn't full. Service swings hard depending who you get. One guest's butler, Sean, was available around the clock and had a blazer steamed without being asked; another spent her last morning fielding a wrong form at the spa and a scheduling call taken mid-conversation in front of her. The core team can be hit or miss in a way that doesn't match the price, and the 25 to 30 minute drive to Grace Bay, down a dirt road full of potholes, means you can't easily escape a bad night for a better dinner. Maintenance complaints (worn trim, tired linens, stained pool towels) show up often enough that a top-dollar room here isn't a guaranteed reno-fresh one.

Book it for the room, the beach, and the quiet, and go in knowing the food and front-line service need lower expectations than the brand name suggests. If flawless, anticipatory service matters more to you than the architecture, people who've done both camps point to Amanera for more consistent care. For the setting alone, nothing else on this island touches it.

No other hotel in Udaipur can put you inside the City Palace compound itself, with a private balcony hanging over Lake Pichola. When you get one of the palace rooms past the second gate, guests describe sunset views and marble-pool mornings that justify the whole trip. Staff like LaluRam, who's worked the property for 37 years, and Sohanlal at the restaurant get named specifically for remembering orders and making the whole operation feel steadier when they're on shift.

The catch is that not every room here is that room. Several guests describe being shown tired, worn accommodation outside the second gate and having to fight for hours to get moved, and one couple ended up in rooms they called barely three-star despite palace pricing. Food is expensive for what it is (around Rs. 2,200 a head at dinner), the restaurant can be slow to seat you or take your order, and a few guests noted the gift shops inside the complex charge triple what you'd pay a few blocks away. The breakfast buffet is consistently the strongest meal of the day, which says something about where the kitchen's attention goes.

Book it for the location and push hard at booking for a lake-facing palace room by name, not just a category. If you land outside the second gate, you're paying heritage prices for a room that wouldn't clear three stars elsewhere in Udaipur, and some guests who have stayed at both found the Taj's nearby properties handle the five-star basics more consistently. For the view and the sense of actually sleeping inside a working palace, though, nothing else in the city gets you there.