'A Rare World' Offers a Rare Look at Luxury Hotels

November 3, 2009 at 5:21 PM | by juliana | 1 Comment

Looking for some new aspirational travel literature to add to your collection as you hop from budget hotel to budget hotel? Then try A Rare World. The luxury travel magazine is published ten times a year at a hefty subscription price of $199. But unlike most magazines, A Rare World actually offers an electronic version (in a PDF file) to go along with your print edition. In fact, the PDF is actually emailed to you first. Then the print version will show up in the mail a few days later.

So what's inside? As expected, luxury hotel reviews. Glancing through a preview edition, which is free and you can obtain one yourself here, we saw a few detailed hotel reviews on South African Safari Lodges which continue to be all the rage as well as a play-by-play review of The Montage Beverly Hills. Meanwhile, the full edition of the first issue goes inside the luxury hotels of Paris from the classics to the boutiques to the trendy new designer hotels. Le Sigh.

What's good here is that the magazine doesn't rely on large pictures to tell the story, like a lot of other luxury travel mags. Sure, photos are very important (ARW uses only stock hotel photos) but there's a lot of information in the reviews too, including a helpful Do's and Don'ts section for each review.

And while ARW doesn't take advertising to avoid any conflict of interest, they do let the property know beforehand that they are coming in to write a review, which as you can imagine probably influences the quality of their stay. In the past few weeks, travel ethics have been heavily debated amongst travel writers about taking hotel comps or going on press trips. A Rare World states in their About section that just because they notified the hotel about their stay doesn't mean they won't write honestly about their experience.

This does hold true for the review of the Montage where the reviewer even encountered some uppity attitude regarding a late departure time. But ARW encourages readers to tell the hotel at the time of booking that they chose this hotel based on the ARW's review and they expect nothing but exceptional service. This is actually very good point whenever you book a hotel based on a review that you've read or even based on a ranking in one of those frequent Best Hotels lists put forth by other travel guides (including us.)

Closing out each issue, there is a news, deals and openings section. We were tickled to see that fun news like David Hasselhoff's outrageous behavior even made it in there.

Bottom Line: The preview PDF was a little tough to manage and is hard to read, so we'd rather just flip through the print edition instead. Besides isn't that how most of us do our aspirational reading still?

$200 for a luxury hotel magazine is probably an investment best reserved for the serious luxury traveler rather than someone aspiring to "go to there." Then again, $200 is still cheaper than a night at most of these hotels.

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