Ritz-Carlton

What we keep running into at Ritz-Carlton is somebody noticing one small thing and then doing something about it. In Philadelphia the team knew we were fighting colds, so our favorite tea kept turning up and the kettle was on when we got back to the room. In Kuala Lumpur our butler took our laundry to a place around the corner and brought it back pressed. At Ras Al Khaimah, an hour outside Dubai, you cross to the villas by speedboat — and the morning we decided to stay in, breakfast arrived on a floating tray in our plunge pool, champagne included. Messy. Worth doing once.

The buildings have nothing to do with each other. Philadelphia’s is a bank finished in 1908 that didn’t become a hotel until 2000, under a dome over 101 feet across — the largest in the western hemisphere when it was built. Hotel Arts in Barcelona is 44 floors of blue glass put up for the 1992 Olympics, with a bar where Diego Baud runs a cocktail masterclass built around your answers to two questions: your favorite season, and how you take your coffee.

At Laguna Niguel, on a cliff an hour up the coast from San Diego, a fireside room comes with its own fire pit and unlimited s’mores kits to the door. We canceled a dinner reservation and ate on the patio instead. Not everything lands — at St. Thomas the drinks at Sails, the casual beachfront place, came out of premade syrups and were too sweet. Then at Coconut Cove I asked the bartender for a good margarita. He winked, said “I got ya,” and it was one of the best we’ve had.