W

What keeps us coming back to W hotels is that they pay attention. At the W Singapore there were cupcakes waiting in the living room and, in the bedroom, a note with a photo of Chris and me from our own travels printed on it. Someone there had read up on us before we arrived.

The room earned its keep too. Hot pink lighting, a wrap-around balcony over the marina, and a bathroom the size of one of our old Tokyo apartments. At night the whole thing shifted — ambient light coming up from under the bed, sweets left on the nightstand. But it’s the note we still bring up.

The hotel sits on Sentosa Cove, the private residential end of Sentosa — a resort island a few kilometers off Singapore that you pay just to enter. Picture Singapore’s manicured sidewalks and lush gardens, then multiply.