the gold list

Our 30th annual Gold List of the world's greatest hotels and cruises captures nearly a year's worth of work. This collection represents hundreds of hours of researching, scouting, and impassioned debating by our team of editors in seven cities across the globe. But more than that, it reflects our ongoing love affair with the places where we stay, which often become our gateways to entire destinations. Read on to inspire your next trip.

BAB AL SHAMS DESERT RESORT AND SPA
Escaping to an Oasis Outside Dubai

FOR ALMOST TWO DECADES, UAE residents have made the 45-minute pilgrimage up AI Qudra Road-past outlandishly shaped man-made lakes, swirling cycling paths, and endurance horse racing tracks. They go to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries or just to enjoy an indulgent weekend at Bab AI Shams. The resort is a study of subtlety and slow reveal in a city that often focuses on the opposite. Its much-photographed infinity pool, which drops off into a vast sandy expanse in a stunning paradox of elemental opposites, is the draw for many.

For me, it's the quiet: all-enveloping and absolute. The resort comes into its own as the sun sets, the silhouettes of sand dunes framed in painterly pinks and mauves, bamboo torches flickering along the perimeter, and lanterns creating a play of light and shadow in outdoor passageways.

It may be unassuming, but Bab AI Shams is not devoid of spectacle. At AI Hadheerah, the colossal, open-air restaurant, nightly performances serve up all the Arabian classics: a belly dancer, a whirling dervish, musicians, singers, a mini souk, and even a reenactment of a Bedouin caravan with camels and horses crisscrossing a bordering desert plateau. Live cooking stations serve up generous grills and regional specialities like lamb salona, harees, and chicken biryani, and the spirited Egyptian chef de cuisine Mohamed Ferjani takes great delight in showing me the underground contraption used to prepare his seven-hour slow-cooked ouzi lamb.