United Arab Emirates

The desert is where the UAE surprised us most. Qasr Al Sarab sits two hours into the Liwa Desert, past a private road, with dunes forty meters tall in every direction — the kind of place where the resort itself, low and the color of the sand, seems to be the only human thing for miles. At.mosphere, the bar inside the Burj Khalifa, is the opposite: the world’s tallest building, and craft cocktails complex enough that each one takes months to perfect and a good ten minutes to make.

Armani Hotel is inside the Burj Khalifa itself — not just in Dubai’s Downtown district, actually built into the world’s tallest building, with the Dubai Mall next door. The Waldorf Astoria sits on Palm Jumeirah, the artificial palm-shaped island that’s the reason most people picture Dubai in the first place, long before they’ve seen it in person. And the Rosewood Abu Dhabi, a 34-story tower on Al Maryah Island, is the one we arrived at 3am with a 6-hour time change and still walked away impressed by.