Poland Hotels Booking

Campton Place is tucked away as discreetly as a luxury hotel can be, just off Union Square and right in the shadow of some more famous big-chain hotels. These days it’s owned by the Taj group, but don’t expect a complete re-branding — this is a century-old San Francisco classic, and only the subtlest of updates were required in order to keep it current with the state of the luxury-hotel art.

What is distinctly Taj-like is the service, which is hyper-attentive and highly professional, in a way that’s not exactly common in American hotels. Rooms are classic, contemporary but far from modernist — here at the high end there’s little tolerance for high-design minimalism. Instead look for classics like Bose wave radios and feather beds with down duvets.

With just over a hundred rooms, it’s smaller than some so-called boutiques — and there’s a hush of privacy about the place that its bigger five-star competitors can’t quite match. The Campton Place restaurant is an institution unto itself, and the new owners know better than to tamper with success: it still serves the same upscale Mediterranean-inflected cuisine in the same ultra-swanky dining room.

If you’re like us you might not think of Jordan first when it’s time to plan a spa getaway. But there’s really no way to go wrong with a location like Ma’In — to say nothing of your hosts, Six Senses, whose Evason spa resorts are a model of high-end consistency. Put it all together and you get the Evason Ma’In Hot Springs & Six Senses Spa.

First the location. The Evason Ma’In lies by the side of a creek, at the bottom of a canyon whose walls are dotted with hot spring waterfalls. It’s something like 800 feet below sea level, but a hundred or two above the level of the Dead Sea, which is the one that matters locally — its heavy, salty water is widely believed to have therapeutic properties, and the spa, for its part, makes liberal use of the mud from the sea floor.

In these surroundings all a hotel really has to do is stay out of the way — but the Evason does a little bit more than that. The architecture is locally inspired, as well as just plain inspired — the atmosphere throughout is palatial, and the accommodations are exceedingly private. Services and amenities are five-star, and there isn’t a classification system that can adequately explain the canyon, waterfall and Dead Sea views. It feels like another world entirely — but it’s just an hour from the Amman airport.

Tourism in Croatia is booming, and demand for quality lodging is far outstripping supply, following what we hope you’ll forgive us for calling a sort of Field of Dreams effect in reverse: “if you come, they will build it.” So the arrival of Zagreb’s first design hotel, a member of the Austrian Arcotel chain, is big news, and comes not a moment too soon.

Anyone who’s half-expecting a dated, provincial take on the design hotel is in for a pleasant surprise — the Allegra’s look is idiosyncratic, yes, but compelling as well, with perfectly elegant minimalist public spaces, and rooms that are livened considerably by boldly patterned (and slightly outré) linens and carpets. The furniture is pared-down and practical, perfectly functional for business traveling and visually sleek enough to appeal to the hip-hotels crowd.

The obligatory lobby bar is, as it should be, patronized by a blend of jet-setters and style-conscious Zagreb locals, and there’s plenty more happening outside — the hotel is just one part of a complex that includes restaurants, cafés, a multiplex cinema and a shopping center, which in turn is just steps from the center of the city, and a short walk from Zagreb’s main train terminal.

Paris is famous for its uniformly elegant architecture: the Belle Époque buildings lining the boulevards, the medieval houses on narrow lanes, the manicured gardens, the glazed corner cafes. No matter how elegant, though, one does occasionally need a break from the uniformity. And this is where a hotel like the Hotel Banke can really help out.

From the outside, it is another classic edifice, standing at a sharp corner like the prow of a ship. Inside is another story – the stunningly grand lobby has been created from the marbled and mosaic’d rotunda of a former bank. Here it will also become apparent that a creative decorator has been at work on the Banke — gold sofas and massive contemporary chandeliers are a dead giveaway. Up some sweeping stairs to your room, you’ll find things leaning more towards the crisp and modern, but not sterile by any stretch. The décor does not completely fall into any single category, just taut, cool and very French. From intimate quarters up in the roof dormers to the most luxurious suite, the Banke is on the money.

It’s also fortunately located almost directly behind the legendary Opéra Garnier and is extremely convenient to loads of cultural institutions — as well as loads of great shopping. The rest of the 8th is just a few steps beyond, home to the Champs-Élysées, Place Vendôme, Place de la Concorde, and all manner of other unmissable sights. A more mysterious Paris hides down tiny alleys and among neighborhoods to the north. This is certainly not to say that staying in at the Banke wouldn’t make for a rewarding day; the hotel’s own Restaurant Josefin provides excellent Mediterranean seasonal fare from up in the skylit balconies of the rotunda. Likewise, the Banke’s LolaBar is a fine spot to spend an evening.

The contrast couldn’t be greater between the self-styled “first spaceship hotel in the world,” the retro-futuristic Hotel Cocoon, and its setting: it’s more or less right at the seaside, but rather than condo complexes and luxury hotels for neighbors it’s bordered by a busy avenue (under which a passage leads from the Cocoon to the beach) and an ordinary residential neighborhood that’s anything but designed.

Salvador is a rough-edged and unpretentious city, a busy port city, not at all the sort of place you’d expect any kind of modern design hotel, much less one like the bizarre and whimsical Cocoon. Imagine something from a slightly campy Sixties sci-fi film come to life in 3-D and dropped to earth at the edge of a wild bamboo forest — at reception you wouldn’t be surprised to see Barbarella herself hand over your room keys.

The exterior is fanciful enough that it’s possible to enter the Cocoon with no idea at all what the rooms are going to look like. In fact it would be quite a letdown to walk through the doors of a spaceship only to be shown to a tasteful monochrome international-style loft bedroom. The interiors don’t disappoint; though calm enough to sleep in, the rooms are fairly bold, in gray concrete and light hardwood, with curvy transparent tubs beside softly glowing platform beds dressed in silk sheets.

A cocktail lounge opens onto the pool deck, which serves as not just the public centerpiece of the hotel but also, more poetically, as something of a mission statement. The Cocoon is inspired less by the charmingly dated science fiction films of the Fifties and Sixties and more by the 1985 Ron Howard film of the same name, in which a group of elderly Americans are rejuvenated by some alien life force at the bottom of a swimming pool next door to their retirement home.

This is a concept that, if anything, gains something in translation. In the United States (maybe anywhere in English-speaking world) a place that’s equal parts hip hotel and Ron Howard reference would be just plain bizarre. In this setting it only deepens the mystique — there’s really nothing else like Hotel Cocoon in Salvador, in Brazil, or anywhere in the world.

How to get there:

Hotel Cocoon & Lounge is 6 1/2 miles from Salvador International Airport. The drive takes approximately 5-10 minutes.

The phrase albergo diffuso might not yet be entirely familiar to English-speaking travelers — or, for that matter, to Italian ones — but the concept that it denotes is one we imagine will quickly catch on. Call it a “distributed hotel” if that makes it clearer — or just take Sassi di Matera as an example. The village of Matera, in far southern Italy, is famous for the houses carved into the volcanic hillsides, some of them dating back to Paleolithic times.

An ordinary hotelier might have built a traditional inn somewhere in town, to offer some proximity to the village’s famous sights. Not Daniele Kihlgren, whose albergo diffuso concept — see also Sextantio — is one of total immersion. Here the hotel rooms occupy the caves themselves — needless to say the look is not exactly frilly or delicate, and the décor is untraditional, to say the least.

What separates Sassi di Matera from merely sleeping in a cave is a certain dedication to luxury, if not quite an ordinary version of it. Your bathroom may be a bare rock cavern, but you can trust in your Milanese host’s taste in fixtures and fittings: your bathtub is the finest money can buy. Prehistoric man might never have ventured outside the caves if they had bathrooms like these.

In the end it’s a concept that might only work in Italy, where respect for history is tempered by the reality of living with it every day. We’d like to see more of this sort of sensitive and creative development. It’s probably too much to ask for an albergo diffuso at Machu Picchu, for example — but after a night or two at Sassi di Matera you might begin thinking along these same lines.

Cairo today is a cosmopolitan and sophisticated city, massive and dense, arguably the capital of the Middle East — so it’s a city with plenty of demand for stylish and contemporary hotels. There was a time, of course, when it was the center of all civilization. The Barceló Cairo Pyramids makes the most of both the old and the new Cairo — it’s a chic and modern high-end hotel, just a few minutes from the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid, and a few more minutes from Cairo’s city center.

It’s a part of the Spanish-based Barceló chain, but that shouldn’t put you off — most of Cairo’s best hotels are imports. Maybe it’s thanks to the company’s house style, but the Barceló is refreshingly free of Orientalist references. From the photos it may come off a bit rootless, but a quick look out the window, with the Pyramids in the distance, instantly establishes a sense of place.

By the standards of some of the luxury hotels in Cairo, the Barceló looks ever so slightly humble — but in this town that just means no spa. By most people’s standards, however, it’s more than comfortable enough, with 24-hour room service, a rooftop pool, three restaurants and three bars, and of course that priceless view of the monuments at Giza.