Side by side Four Seasons Resort Mallorca at Formentor vs Passalacqua

This is a former 1929 hotel rebuilt inside its original footprint, with every single room turned to face the water instead of the hill behind it, and it shows: even the entry-level Pine View rooms get a partial sea view. Base rooms run from roughly $1,200 to $1,800 a night in shoulder season, climbing past $2,000 in July and August, and what arrives for that money is genuinely different from most Four Seasons: department managers introducing themselves in your first two days, a GM who greets families personally, staff who remember a toddler's name by dinner two. The pool, spa and gym (proper Technogym kit, rare for a European hotel gym) all land well, and Shima, the Japanese-Peruvian restaurant, is the one thing almost nobody leaves off their highlight list.

The trade-off is the peninsula itself. The only road in is a narrow, cyclist-choked mountain route that can take well over an hour from Palma, and more than one couple has cancelled every dinner reservation off property rather than drive it after dark. On site, you're down to two real dinner restaurants (Mel draws complaints about portions not matching its prices), so a week here without a car or the hotel boat to Port de Pollença can start to feel repetitive by night four or five. The beach is public and, by Spanish law, has no chair-side food or drink service, which catches first-time Four Seasons guests off guard.

Book this for families and couples who want to disappear onto a private-feeling estate rather than tour the island: the kids' program, the separated adult and family pools, and the sheer scale of the grounds all support a slow, do-nothing week. If your idea of a Mallorca trip is town-hopping to Deià or Sóller every other night, pair it with a few nights somewhere more central rather than trying to base here for six or seven straight, and go for the boat transfer over the road if the schedule lets you.

Passalacqua costs somewhere north of €2,500 a night for a standard room and what arrives, for most people, is the best version of an Italian villa stay money can currently buy on this lake. The 1787 house has 24 rooms, which means the staff-to-guest ratio shows: Michaela and Alice walk guests through the terraced gardens unasked, and one honeymooning couple got a handwritten vegetarian tasting menu after mentioning dietary preferences by the pool that same afternoon. The grounds, the in-house florist, the underground spa cave carved into the hillside: this is the rare hotel where the photos undersell it.

The restaurant is the real soft spot, and it's worth pricing in before you book. Multiple guests report a kitchen that can't keep pace with the setting: wrong courses, a soufflé that wasn't one, and in one case a salad arriving with flies in it on a night the main restaurant turned away its own hotel guests for a private event. The gym is small and several reviews call it tired for the rate. None of this touches breakfast, which is consistently the best meal of the stay, or the bar, where the mixologist Andrea gets singled out by name for a tasting class worth booking.

Book it for the villa rooms over the Casa al Lago cottages, which sit a steep, long walk from the main house. Couples and honeymooners get the most out of it; families with older kids might prefer the livelier Grand Hotel Tremezzo down the lake, which has more going on after dark. For a quiet few days where the hotel itself is the destination, nothing on Como touches it.