Side by side Fairmont Udaipur Palace vs The Carlyle, A Rosewood Hotel

Fairmont opened this palace in July 2025, and it is built for weddings rather than passing trade: expect a packed events calendar and plan around it. What you get for that is a genuinely large, playful take on palace architecture in the hills above Udaipur, rooms with private plunge pools, and a staff that keeps fixing things most hotels would let slide. One guest's phone went missing at a wedding lunch; the head of security stayed on the case through borrowed numbers until it turned up. Another family had their quiet corner protected from a wedding party by being moved, unprompted, to a calmer wing with their own pool.

The trade-off is real and worth pricing in. Book during wedding season and you may wait on a buggy, queue at check-in, or watch the buffet dinner turn lukewarm while the kitchen is stretched across a banquet and a dining room at once; one guest's à la carte dinner was excellent the same night their buffet was mediocre. The hotel also sits well outside Udaipur proper, so a private cab or Uber back into the old city takes planning, not a wave at the door. The buffet and the peak-wedding crowds are the one consistent gap between what's promised and what shows up on a packed weekend.

None of that should talk you out of it. Book a plunge-pool room and eat à la carte, not buffet, on any night there's a wedding on property. Go for a family trip, an anniversary, or a quieter shoulder-season stretch and the mini golf, pickleball, multiple pools and the gym (genuinely excellent, by more than one account) make it worth the distance from town. For a few nights of being properly looked after in the hills outside Udaipur, this earns the booking.

A room here starts around $1,400 a night and a basic deluxe king can run closer to $1,200 before taxes, and what you get for it is a hotel that still feels like a hotel rather than a lobby full of phones. The art deco rooms and the Ludwig Bemelman murals in the bar downstairs are the reason people keep coming back, and more than one guest mentions getting waved past the two-hour line at Bemelmans just for being a hotel guest. One traveler recovering from surgery at a nearby hospital was given an entire floor to herself and a stocked kitchen with a blender for protein shakes, arranged by a travel advisor who'd told the hotel why she needed the quiet.

The catch is consistency. Some rooms haven't been touched in years, the elevators are slow, and a few recent stays describe real problems: brown water from the taps, a scabies scare that the hotel wouldn't document, room service orders that never showed up. The food on property is the weakest part of the case — plant-based options are thin, the cheese plate on room service has been described as a few cubes on a dish, and the gym is small enough that regulars book the Surrey next door just to work out. None of that is universal, and the good stays outnumber the bad ones by a wide margin, but at these prices a brown-water afternoon or a missed room service order lands harder than it would somewhere cheaper.

Book it for the Central Park Suite or a high floor if you can get one, for a seat at Bemelmans, and for a version of New York that doesn't exist much anymore. Skip it if what you actually want is a modern gym, adventurous food, or to be near downtown. For anyone chasing old New York glamour with real service behind it, nothing else on the Upper East Side does it quite the same way.