Luxury hotels are having a glorious moment

IN DONCASTER, ABT town in northern England, $100,000 will buy you a four-bedroom house. In Dubai, it will get you a four-bedroom penthouse—for a night. The Royal Mansion, the nightly rate for which makes it the world’s priciest suite, sits on the 18th and 19th floors of the Atlantis The Royal hotel. It comes with 1,100 square metres (12,000 square feet) of marble floors, a terrace with an infinity pool, a steam room, Hermès shampoo, $500 bathrobes, a not-so-mini bar and, naturally, a butler.The Royal Mansion’s opulence—and price—are hard to rival. But only a bit less posh properties are popping up from the Okavango Delta in Botswana to Kangaroo Island in southern Australia. Saudi Arabia is building eco-resorts on the Red Sea with a collective 8,000 rooms, which one executive calls the “new Maldives”. London’s Tower is being converted into a high-end hotel. For well-heeled globetrotters, all these cannot come up fast enough.