Bora Bora is the image that the phrase “overwater bungalow” calls up — the specific photograph of a wooden structure on stilts above water so clear and so vividly turquoise that it appears computer-generated, with Mount Otemanu rising from the island’s basalt core in the background. The photograph is not exaggerated. Bora Bora’s lagoon, enclosed…
The guest that Banyan Tree Samui is for has usually already stayed somewhere more famous and found, in the gap between expectation and reality, that fame and quality are not the same variable. They have decided, perhaps consciously and perhaps by process of elimination, that what they want is not more — not more pools,…
There is a particular kind of traveller who has stayed at twelve or fifteen luxury resorts and finds, somewhere around the tenth, that the word luxury has stopped meaning anything. The pools become interchangeable. The spa menus blur into each other. The welcome drink arrives on a silver tray and the feeling it produces is…
The thing about Barbados — the thing that takes a day or two to properly land — is that the warmth is not a service standard. Other islands train for it. Barbados simply has it, woven into the way a bartender hands you a drink, the way a housekeeper remembers that you asked for an…
A guest counted twenty reef sharks in a single snorkelling session from the water’s edge before breakfast. Another — on their fourth Maldives trip, with three five-star resorts behind them — called it the best snorkelling of their life, anywhere, without qualification. Sandies Bathala is not the most glamorous resort on this list. It is…