Side by side Rosewood Hong Kong vs Mandarin Oriental The Landmark, Hong Kong

This is a hotel built to photograph well and mostly it delivers: Grand Harbour View rooms with walk-in closets, double showers, and Victoria Harbour filling every window, plus a Manor Club lounge that guests describe eating three meals a day in rather than leaving for the city. The design is the reason to book, full stop, from the mirrored bathrooms to the art scattered through the corridors like a small gallery. Chaat's Indian food and the Butterfly Patisserie's taro cake come up often enough to plan around.

Service is where the reports scatter, and that's worth pricing in before you pay these rates. Some guests get a butler who tracks down a specific stroller model mid-trip and remembers a tea order by day two; others get no welcome drink while the couple next to them gets one, stained towels, or a call for room service that gets bounced between three phone lines. The pool closing at 6pm surprises people every summer, and the spa facilities read as smaller and older than the rest of the building suggests. None of this is enough to skip the hotel, but at this price a coin-flip on the front desk is a real cost, not a nitpick, and it shows up too often to call it bad luck.

Book it for the room and the harbour view, which nothing else in Tsim Sha Tsui touches. If your priority is easier walking access to the city's best restaurants and a more even service floor, people who've done both keep pointing toward the Mandarin Oriental in Central. But for the building itself, the Manor Club, and waking up to that skyline, this is still the one worth the splurge.

This is the newer of the two Central Mandarin Orientals, a few buildings from the original, and the case for it comes down to the address: a covered walkway straight into Landmark mall, Man Wah rated by more than one traveler as some of the best Chinese food in the city, and doormen who remember your face by the second night. One guest recovering from a knee injury got upgraded to a room with a proper soaking tub and help onto the wheelchair lift without being asked twice. Another had a birthday and left with an upgrade and a warm word from the same doorman on every return to the lobby.

The catch is that this is a hotel still finishing its renovation, and it shows. Rooms have come back spacious and comfortable for most people, but at least one stay flagged a bathroom with no outlet by the vanity and finishes that already looked tired. The bigger issue is the spa and gym were not running at all during recent stays, with guests sent to another hotel's facilities and not warned about it before they booked a staycation built around exactly that. Breakfast is mixed too: several people loved it, one found the à la carte spread thin and the order wrong twice.

Book it for Central, for Man Wah, and for staff who clearly take pride in the small stuff. Skip the staycation angle until wellness is actually back, and confirm what's open before you pay for it.