La Residencia, A Belmond Hotel vs The Thief

This is a hillside hotel in the middle of Deia, not a beach resort, and that single fact decides who should book it. What arrives for it: two converted manor houses wrapped in olive groves, a pool team that brings iced water and a vitamin C mist to your lounger before you've settled in, and a breakfast that multiple guests call the best hotel breakfast they've had anywhere. The Poet's Walk through the gardens, the resident donkeys, an in-house art collection tied to the village's history as an artist colony: this is a genuine sense of place, not a generic five-star shell.

The trade-offs are real and worth pricing in before you book. Rooms in the original buildings run traditional Mallorcan, dark wood and tile, and guests are split on whether that reads as charm or as overdue for a refresh (a renovation has been promised for a while and appears to be rolling out unevenly, so ask specifically which building and whether it's been touched). Terrace and bar pricing draws genuine anger in a way that feels avoidable at this rate, and a few recent stays report front desk and restaurant service that swung from warm to indifferent within the same visit. Air conditioning complaints cluster in peak August heat and are worth asking about if you're travelling then.

Book this for a mountain base with a real sense of history, not for beach days: pair it with a stay somewhere on the water if you want both. Ask for a renovated room, expect Deia's tourist buses during the day, and go in shoulder season if quiet matters to you. For the setting, the grounds, and a hotel that treats returning guests and first-timers the same way at the pool, it earns the trip.

The Thief sells you a peninsula, and it delivers one. Perched on the tip of Tjuvholmen, with sailboats passing the balcony and the Astrup Fearnley museum next door, it's the best waterfront position in Oslo, and reviewers rarely disagree. The bigger draw for repeat guests is breakfast: buffet and à la carte both included, and travellers who say they've stayed at every hotel in the city keep calling it the best morning meal in Oslo. The rooms themselves are art-gallery pieces — original contemporary work throughout, clever mirror placement to pull in the fjord view, a rooftop bar with vinyl you can actually play on the turntable.

Staff are the wild card. One June 2026 guest got a broken door lock patched with duct tape and a downgrade with no apology; that same month, turndown tried to enter a room with the Do Not Disturb sign up, security bolt and all. Set against that: Isabella upgrading a tired arrival to a higher floor, Sylvester holding the same cozy breakfast table morning after morning and warming the milk for tea without being asked, Juliane talking a fully-booked restaurant into a last-minute table. Both are true of the same hotel, sometimes the same season. Book a fjord-facing room, not one toward the alley — the museum-side rooms take truck and foot traffic most of the night, by multiple accounts, and standard rooms run small with some visible wear. The spa is genuinely relaxing but charges extra on top of already steep rates, which stings more than it should.

Worth it for the location and the breakfast alone, provided you get the room orientation right. Travellers chasing flawless, evenly-run service tend to land at Sommerro instead, though it doesn't have this waterfront. For the fjord views and the eggs, nothing else in Oslo is close.