Four Seasons Hotel Tokyo

Space is at a premium in Hong Kong, and the harbor-view rooms at the Mandarin Oriental manage to fit three stirringly distinct environments inside a cozy 400-square-foot space. An airy, tiled bathroom area opens onto the master bedroom, a nap-inducing wood-paneled chamber craftily separated from an bright window alcove by a set of heavy curtains — close them and it’s lights out; open them and the harbor view streams through the room. It’s an incredibly inviting exercise in spatial flow, locally referred to as feng shui.

Every hotel in a large Asian city is tasked with the same mandate – to make more with less. The results can often be wonderfully schizophrenic: quiet, earth-toned rooms rife with cutting-edge technology, hushed French dining salons set against pulsing nightclubs. Visitors at the Four Seasons Hotel Tokyo at Marunouchi are perched on top of bullet trains pulling into Central Station, and the windows at the Mandarin Oriental in Kuala Lumpur are primarily occupied by the Petronas Towers, which loom a few hundred yards away. The suites in these hotels tend to be small, elegant and heavily sound-proofed.

In compiling a list of the best hotels on the continent, we consulted with one of the most lauded group of travel experts ever assembled — an eclectic array of industry leaders, ranging from well-known names like Peter Greenberg of NBC’s Today Show and Mark Bunting of the Discovery Channel, to consummate insiders like resort specialist Andrew Harper. The list we came up with can be roughly divided into four categories: grande dames, beach resorts, inland escapes and the aforementioned mega-city hotels.