Side by side Four Seasons Hotel New York vs Waldorf Astoria New York

The address is unbeatable: five minutes from Central Park, an I.M. Pei limestone tower whose lobby still stops people mid-step. That's the case for booking, and it's a real one. But this reopened in stages through 2024 and 2025 after a long closure, and what came back is uneven. Some rooms have been refreshed with clean, calm layouts and standout bathrooms; other guests, in the same year, walked into rooms with the same shower fixtures and faux orchids as before the closure. That's not a small gap.

Service is where the split really shows. Most people who write about this hotel talk about a specific person who made their stay: Milton at breakfast, Christina G. arranging a birthday surprise, a bellman named Eddie. But there's also a front-desk phone rep who volunteered the price of the Ty Warner Penthouse to a caller who'd asked a simple question about a TV, and a lobby incident where a guest was accused of not looking like she could afford to be there. The staff can be genuinely excellent, and the hotel has let a couple of ugly moments happen at the door. There's no full spa currently, just a limited third-party setup most guests skip, and the gym is small for the category.

Book it for the location, the Garden restaurant, and the chance of a room that's actually been redone: ask specifically about a renovated floor before you commit. If a fully modernized room matters more than the address, the Downtown Four Seasons or the Carlyle are worth pricing against this one first. For a Central Park view and that lobby, this still earns its place.

The 2026 reopening gave the Waldorf Astoria New York 375 rooms where it used to have over 1,400, and the trade shows up immediately: a junior suite now runs upward of 600 square feet, with a sitting area, desk and bar that older Manhattan hotels don't bother with. Pierre-Yves Rochon, who did the George V, restored the bronze elevator doors, the lobby mosaics and the Silver Corridor murals rather than papering over them, so the public rooms still look like 1931 while the guest rooms are unmistakably new. Staff get named constantly and specifically: a doorman walking a first-time guest's luggage in with real warmth, a front desk agent who found room for a family's 10th-birthday trip during the tennis tournament crush, a concierge who turned a casual question about hotel history into an hour-long private tour.

The catch is scale in the wrong places. Several guests flag the bathrooms and closets as tight even in suites, and one detailed report calls out bathroom tile that doesn't line up at the seams, a strange miss on a renovation this expensive. There's no pool, and no hot tub, which matters if that's part of how you unwind on a trip, though the Guerlain spa compensates somewhat with a treatment room that actually generates snow. Park Avenue–facing rooms get traffic noise, so ask for the other side if you're a light sleeper. One guest who has also stayed at Aman New York put it plainly: Aman's rooms and pool win on paper, but the Waldorf's service and food pull ahead for less money, and the public spaces here feel lived-in rather than hushed.

Book it if you want Art Deco history with modern rooms and don't need a pool or a sprawling bathroom. Families and pet owners get real consideration here, down to chef-prepared dog amenities and connecting rooms across nearly every category. If a pool is non-negotiable, that's a fair reason to look elsewhere; if it isn't, this is the Midtown stay worth the splurge.