Side by side Oberoi Udaivilas vs RAAS Devigarh

Book the Premier Lake View room and you get a moated pool that wraps the building like a private lagoon, the City Palace lit up across the water at dinner, and a boat arrival with rose petals that genuinely does the theatrical thing hotels usually only promise. At roughly $800 a night and up, this is not the cheapest palace hotel on Lake Pichola, but the ones who've stayed elsewhere in the city keep landing back here. The Mewari architecture — hand-painted frescoes, mirror mosaics, gold-leafed domes across 30 acres of courtyards and reflection pools — earns the reputation on sight, before a single staff interaction happens.

And the staff interactions are the other half of the case. One guest travelling with a toddler found the team had handled a request before she'd voiced it; another had a duty manager personally upgrade a babymoon suite. That said, the restaurant reservation system has real cracks: one family's confirmed dinner booking evaporated on arrival, another was told a table didn't exist while both restaurants sat empty, and a bill dispute over an extra dish went unresolved after the server promised a reversal. None of that is catastrophic, but it's worth calling ahead to reconfirm anything booked more than a day out, and it's the one place the famous attentiveness doesn't fully hold.

Go for a family celebration, a honeymoon, or the kind of trip where you want the property itself to be the event: peacocks on the lawn at dawn, an astrology session, a candle room lit with 22 flames at night. Skip the on-property boat transfers after dark without confirming them twice; one family was left waiting lakeside after a promised return boat never materialized. For everything else, book it for the domes and the lake, and let the staff do the rest.

A restored 18th-century fort in the Aravalli Hills, about 28km outside Udaipur, and the thing that separates it from the city's palace hotels is exactly that distance: no lake traffic, no crowds, just a green-marble pool and a dining room lit up at night. Guests keep ordering the molten chocolate cake on repeat and booking private dinners at the Sheesh Mahal. The restoration work is the headline here — original stonework, a genuine sense of history rather than a palace-style build done with modern techniques.

The kitchen doesn't always clear the bar its prices set. One family's gatta sabzi and dal batti churma disappointed, and another guest flatly called the food under par for a five-star given what it costs, with waiters pushy enough about ordering to notice. There's also a harder edge worth knowing about: a guest with a documented medical emergency was refused any refund on a cancelled stay, and at least one walk-in couple found the front desk rigid about property access and seating. Price in the cancellation policy before you book, because it isn't flexible.

None of that undoes what the place does well. The rooms split clearly: garden suites with higher ceilings and a private gazebo suit families, palace suites suit couples who want the grander, more enclosed spaces. Staff like Samrudh and Jamil Khan get remembered by name for a reason, and the pet-friendly policy, rose-petal arrivals and morning yoga sessions add up to a stay people rebook years later. Book it for the fort and the quiet, plan your meals before you arrive, and read the cancellation terms twice.