The travel site for honest, literate reviews of high-end resorts and other destinations. Welcome!
This last June and July, my wife and I spent a month in Paris, based in a charming apartment located in the 16th arrondissement in the Passy neighborhood on the west side of the city. We dined out daily, were visited by friends, shopped like locals, and in general tried to get a feel for […]
It’s Bastille Day, 2025, and as a pleasant interruption to our month-long stay in Paris, we’re off to Versailles to spend the day and night in the Airelles Chateau de Versailles. Airelles is a high-end hotel chain with outposts in Courchevel, St. Tropez, and Venice. We’ve read a lot about their relatively new hotel a […]
Herewith, an unvarnished diary of the Spoiled Guest’s 12-day trip to the Maldives, via Istanbul, late last year: October 30 -31, 2024 The Turkish Airlines check-in desks at JFK Terminal 1 are unmanned when we arrive in late afternoon. (turns out they only open 4 hours before the next flight, note to self), so we […]
As we prepared to depart after a three-night stay in the Aman New York, my wife commented that there was one thing (and only one) that she would miss about this grand hotel: the toilet. She meant the fully electronic Toto toilet in the vault-like water closet of our room, with its warm seat and […]
When it comes to high-end hotels on the Right Bank in Paris, how does one choose? One of the oldest is the Ritz, where the Spoiled Guest has stayed on multiple occasions. One of the newest is the Cheval Blanc, a creation of the LVMH luxury conglomerate headed by French business mogul Bernard Arnault, and […]
The Spoiled Guest was lucky enough to have been introduced to the tiny, mountainous Caribbean island of St. Barthélemy over 30 years ago, when it was just being discovered by the mainstream travel press and was still a spot where celebrity couples like Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley would vacation unencumbered by anyone’s excessive interest. […]
Samuel Johnson is widely misquoted as observing that when a man is tired of Paris, he is tired of life (he was actually talking about London). I have happily misquoted him every time I visited Paris over the last 30 or so years, because the essence of the observation seemed irrefutable: there is so much […]
Last Spring, the Spoiled Guest toured several favorite spots in Europe — Paris, Lake Garda in Italy, Vienna, Saltzburg, and Munich. There follows an unvarnished, essentially verbatim diary of the trip, with an emphasis on hotels and restaurants that we hope fellow travelers will find useful and entertaining! Thurs. 5/24 Arrive Paris around 6:30 am […]
A few minutes flying time east of Florida lies the archipelago of the Bahamas, still part of the British Commonwealth, still nominally ruled by Queen Elizabeth, yet populated by the descendants of African slaves brought here by Crown Loyalists after the War of Independence, and of freed slaves who escaped to the Bahamas after the American […]
I wonder when St. Barth will reach that tipping point that is the fate of every paradise, where it slips into the ordinariness of everyday life.
Spoiled Guest 