Four Seasons Hotel Tokyo at Otemachi vs Royal Mansour Marrakech

A room here runs you well over $1,000 a night and what you actually get for it is service that keeps surprising people who've stayed at a dozen Four Seasons before. Guests get escorted to the 39th-floor lobby and checked in without ever standing at a desk, and the stories pile up: a front desk agent arranging an English-speaking doctor and off-menu chicken broth for a guest with food poisoning, a concierge team coordinating an entire week of reservations over WhatsApp before the flight even landed. The breakfast gets called the best in Tokyo often enough that it's worth building a morning around, and Virtu, the bar off the lobby, has a following of its own.

Where it gets more mixed: the rooms lean minimalist rather than warm, which a few guests flag as un-Four-Seasons, and the lobby sitting six floors up means two separate elevators to reach a room, which reads as fussy after a long flight. One guest found the spa's steel-lined pool and rules-heavy vibe more clinical than relaxing. And the address, ten minutes from Tokyo Station rather than in the middle of Ginza or Shibuya, splits opinion: some love the quiet, some call it inconvenient for transit despite the subway lines underneath the building. Janu Tokyo, the newer arrival at Azabudai Hills, comes up constantly as the alternative — better suites, weaker views, no age minimum at this pool versus most others.

Book it if you want a Tokyo base that treats you like a regular by day two and don't need to be in the middle of Shibuya's noise. The views of the Imperial Palace and, on clear days, Mount Fuji, are hard to argue with at any price.

What you're paying for is a house, not a room: one of 53 private three-story riads, each with its own courtyard fountain and a plunge pool on the roof, connected by a tunnel network that keeps staff and housekeeping carts entirely out of sight. Guests who've also done Amanjena and the Mandarin Oriental still call this the most ambitious build in the city, and the craftsmanship (the zellige, the carved plaster, the cedar work, all commissioned by the king) backs that up. One returning guest going back to 2018 keeps returning; on his most recent trip, some of the newer staff didn't recognize him, which tells you as much about turnover as anything a spreadsheet could.

The service is genuinely the trade-off here, and it isn't a single bad night. Plenty of people get butlers who anticipate everything: one guest's butler walked her through the tunnel system unprompted and explained how the whole place is designed so you never see a cart. But rooms going uncleaned by mid-afternoon comes up often enough into 2026 to be a real pattern, and the spa booking system ($350 a session) is a documented mess, ignored calls, no response on WhatsApp, guests giving up entirely. More than one traveller lands on the same word for the formality here: polished but a little sterile, grand rather than warm. None of this is universal, but it's frequent enough to price in rather than dismiss.

The food carries its own weight regardless: the Grand Moroccain and the French restaurant both turn up as highlights independent of service complaints, and the hammam is excellent when you can actually get in. This is a hotel for disappearing into for three or four days, not a base for running the Medina hard. If warmth over grandeur matters more to you than architecture, that's worth naming honestly before booking. For the riad alone, it's worth it.