Side by side Four Seasons Surf Club vs Four Seasons Bosphorus

The building is a restored 1930s beach club, and it shows in a way few hotels this size manage: coffered ceilings, archways, a champagne bar room guests describe as the best in the hotel. Rooms run large by Miami standards, under 80 keys total, so the pool and beach never feel packed even in season. That scarcity is most of what you're paying for, along with a front desk and pool staff that guests keep calling out by name for fixing problems before they escalate.

The trade-offs are worth knowing before you book. The property is pricey for what lands on the plate: Sunday brunch guests complain doesn't include coffee without an upcharge, and more than one person found the food merely fine for a Four Seasons, bland compared to other outposts of the same brand. The bigger issue is two separate reports of staff walking into occupied rooms unannounced, one at night, one involving a security officer standing over a sleeping guest who says the door was deadbolted. The hotel's handling of that second incident, a slow refund and a manager treating it like a late room service order, is a real mark against a brand that sells itself on trust. Book a cabana and ignore the brunch menu, and most of the complaints about food evaporate: in-room dining and dinner at Lido get consistent praise.

This is the right call for a quiet, grown-up Miami stay, away from the Faena scene and the crowding reported at 1 Hotel South Beach. Families do well here too, with a real kids club and sand toys by the beach, though anyone chasing nightlife should look toward South Beach proper instead. Worth the money for the room and the restaurant alone, less so if a flawless security record matters more to you than the building.

A room in the old palace wing here comes with 20-foot ceilings and a view of the Bosphorus that nobody guesses from a listing photo. That's the case for booking: this is one of the only hotels in Istanbul built into actual palace architecture, and the front desk and doormen get named and praised constantly, from airport pickup through checkout. Breakfast keeps coming up as one of the best hotel spreads in the city, with real effort put into dietary requests.

The catch is that a Four Seasons rate here doesn't buy Four Seasons consistency. One family was pulled aside over dog policy after checking in and paying, then denied pool seating with no apparent resolution. A business breakfast group got told to vacate a table mid-meal by a seating manager who blamed them for sitting down unassisted. Guests who've been coming for years mention the palace rooms have no balconies and the bathrooms in some categories feel like they haven't been touched in a refurb, and the smoking policy around the pool bothers more than one traveller enough to say they wouldn't return. The breakfast and the palace suites are worth the price; the day-to-day staff experience outside the front desk is the real gamble.

Book it if the palace history and the water views are the point of the trip, not a fast pass through old town. First-timers who want to walk to the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia are better off at the brand's own Sultanahmet property, a converted prison a short walk from everything. For a Bosphorus base with resort space, a proper spa day, and one of the better breakfasts in Istanbul, this earns the booking.