Four Seasons Hotel Istanbul at Sultanahmet vs Four Seasons Surf Club

This is the old-town choice: a former prison turned 65-room courtyard hotel, a few minutes' walk from the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia, and the reason people keep coming back is the staff, not the building. One guest was called by name on day one. Another had a birthday cake and champagne in the room, and the pillowcases changed to read "Happy Birthday," without ever mentioning the date to anyone. A manager sat down for dinner in the courtyard and pulled up old photos on an iPad to walk a guest through the building's past as a political (not violent) prison, the original beams still carrying prisoner inscriptions.

Price that against what's missing. There's no pool and no spa on property — you shuttle or take the courtesy yacht to the Bosphorus sister hotel for either, on set departure times that a few guests found inconvenient. The all-day restaurant is small for a Four Seasons, and while the courtyard breakfast gets consistent praise (the simit with honey, the Turkish eggs), dinner and the bar draw more mixed marks — one long-stay guest called the food and cocktails solidly good but not great. Rooms vary too: some suites split the bed and bathroom across two floors via a staircase, a quirk of the building's prison-era layout that a few travelers found genuinely annoying rather than charming.

Book this one for a first Istanbul trip, when walking to every major sight matters more than a pool. The location and the service are the case, and neither slips. Travelers wanting a bigger resort feel with a proper spa tend to look at the Bosphorus waterfront hotels instead, but for old-town charm and staff who notice everything, nothing nearby competes.

No other hotel in Miami has this building: a restored 1930 prohibition-era beach club with coffered ceilings and arched corridors, a hotel and two residential towers grafted onto it by an owner who'd already had to buy the Palm Beach property because he wasn't allowed to build a rival next to his own club there. Under 80 rooms keeps the pools and beach genuinely uncrowded, and it's the detail travelers mention most, alongside staff who remember faces on a second visit: a front-desk regular named Patch, a pool bartender named Agustin who wished one guest a happy anniversary unasked. Thomas Keller's Surf Club restaurant is the other reason people book: guests call it a top-three Miami dining room.

Now the part worth pricing in properly. There's a real pattern of staff or security entering occupied rooms without warning, including a 2026 account of security walking into a guest's locked, dark room at night while they slept. Management's response was slow: a resort-credit offer, then a promised one-night refund that took over a month to arrive. Breakfast and brunch pricing draws steady frustration too: a $125 Sunday brunch that charges extra for coffee is a fair complaint, and a few recent guests found the food merely fine for what a Four Seasons should deliver. The Keller restaurant runs independently of the hotel, so no room charge, no guaranteed table, and bar service that's hit-or-miss. Surfside sits well north of South Beach, closer to Bal Harbour than the strip: restful if that's what you want, inconvenient if you came to eat around the city.

Book it for the building, the quiet, and the restaurant if you want the most old-world week Miami money buys and can live with an unresolved privacy lapse. Travelers chasing a livelier scene tend to land at Faena instead. For a calm, historic stretch of sand, nothing else in Miami is close.