Fairmont

Take the bee tour at the Fairmont Waterfront in Vancouver and they zip you into a beekeeper suit. Four hives sit on the third-floor terrace — a quarter of a million bees, 125 pounds of honey a year — and I spent an hour up there working with the team. Downstairs at ARC, the cocktails are built around herbs from that same rooftop garden, and some of them use the hives’ honey. Mine were the Flaming Rosemary Gimlet and the Sage Paloma.

Getting to the Fairmont Maldives, Sirru Fen Fushi means a seaplane of more than an hour after you land. Then the pool you’ve already seen on Instagram: the longest in the Maldives, running the width of the island, palm trees growing out of the middle of it, the far end stopping at the ocean. What we didn’t expect was the sushi chef at Kata, who taught us both how to shape nigiri properly and what makes his rice better than everyone else’s. The Willow Stream spa felt dated to me. The massages didn’t.

The Fairmont Hotel Vancouver is the one locals call the Castle in the City. It’s the third hotel in the city to carry the name, finished in time to host King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Dior and Gucci line the lobby floor, and the dining room is called Notch 8, after a train’s top speed. I found the room itself a little too historical for my taste; the chilled bubbles and chocolates waiting in it were not a problem. At the Fairmont Chateau Whistler, the spa opens with a questionnaire that sorts you into a dosha, the body type meant to steer your treatment. Ours came back dominant in all three, and nobody knew what to make of us.