Rosewood Hong Kong vs Mandarin Oriental The Landmark, Hong Kong

The curved Kohn Pedersen Fox tower on the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront is still the strongest argument in the whole pile of reviews: corner harbour suites and the Grand Harbour View rooms deliver a view and a room size nothing else in Hong Kong quite matches. On the 40th-floor Manor Club, staff keep track of the small things: a returning guest's tea order, ice already in the room by day two, a signature dish rotated in each evening from one of the restaurants downstairs. CHAAT comes up constantly as a favourite, and more than one traveller has called the taro cake at Butterfly Patisserie the best they've had anywhere. That's the case for booking it.

Outside the Manor Club, the story gets uneven. Several recent guests describe arriving with no one to help with bags or open the car door; one family found their child's bed hadn't been set up on a late-night arrival. Housekeeping lapses show up too often for the price: stained towels, a room left completely unserviced for a full day. Breakfast turns chaotic on busy mornings, with slow tables and dropped orders. A few guests who booked because of "world's best" rankings said the day-to-day didn't match the billing and switched their loyalty to Four Seasons or Mandarin Oriental mid-trip. One traveller on a third stay this year says the front door has genuinely gotten better compared with a year ago: more people on hand, warmer check-ins, though the polish still isn't there every time.

Book a Manor Club room or a suite and go for the food and the view, and this holds up as one of the better stays in the city. Go in on a base room expecting flawless service at every turn and you may end up writing the same complaint as everyone else. Either way, book it for the room and the harbour, not for the reputation.

This is the newer, sleeker Mandarin Oriental in Central, a few buildings over from the original, and what you're paying for is the address as much as the hotel: step outside and you're inside the Landmark mall's restaurant floor, a short walk from Man Wah's sister spots and the rest of Central's fine dining. Guests keep landing on the same thing: a doorman who remembers your evening plans, a reservations team that upgrades you for a birthday, someone from the front desk walking you all the way to the Airport Express when the route gets confusing. The location does a lot of the work here, and the renovated rooms mostly read as genuinely spacious and comfortable.

Price this one in before you book, though: at least one recent stay found no spa or gym on property at all, guests redirected to another hotel's facilities without being told in advance, which is a real problem for a brand built partly on its spa reputation. Breakfast is inconsistent too, swinging from "absolutely perfect" to a thin a la carte menu with an order that arrived wrong twice. The renovation hasn't finished settling in every room; one guest found a bathroom with no outlet for a hairdryer and bedding with a hole in it, while another called the same refreshed rooms a highlight of the stay.

Book this over the original Mandarin Oriental or the Rosewood if what you want is a quieter, more business-district version of Central with the mall food scene downstairs, and you're not fussed about a full-service spa right now. Skip it if the spa and gym are why you're paying Mandarin Oriental prices in the first place; ask directly what's operating before you commit to a room here.