The Carlyle, A Rosewood Hotel vs Rosewood Hong Kong

A room here starts around $1,400 a night and a basic deluxe king can run closer to $1,200 before taxes, and what you get for it is a hotel that still feels like a hotel rather than a lobby full of phones. The art deco rooms and the Ludwig Bemelman murals in the bar downstairs are the reason people keep coming back, and more than one guest mentions getting waved past the two-hour line at Bemelmans just for being a hotel guest. One traveler recovering from surgery at a nearby hospital was given an entire floor to herself and a stocked kitchen with a blender for protein shakes, arranged by a travel advisor who'd told the hotel why she needed the quiet.

The catch is consistency. Some rooms haven't been touched in years, the elevators are slow, and a few recent stays describe real problems: brown water from the taps, a scabies scare that the hotel wouldn't document, room service orders that never showed up. The food on property is the weakest part of the case — plant-based options are thin, the cheese plate on room service has been described as a few cubes on a dish, and the gym is small enough that regulars book the Surrey next door just to work out. None of that is universal, and the good stays outnumber the bad ones by a wide margin, but at these prices a brown-water afternoon or a missed room service order lands harder than it would somewhere cheaper.

Book it for the Central Park Suite or a high floor if you can get one, for a seat at Bemelmans, and for a version of New York that doesn't exist much anymore. Skip it if what you actually want is a modern gym, adventurous food, or to be near downtown. For anyone chasing old New York glamour with real service behind it, nothing else on the Upper East Side does it quite the same way.

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.