Star Power

Nothing says luxury as loudly as a string of stars, but what they really mean is often anybody's guess. Herewith, the ultimate guide to hotel and restaurant ratings.

For "Food Fight," a related story on the new Michelin Guide to New York, click here

Grade Inflation
Are six-star hotels the new height of luxury or just a marketers' dream? Debra A. Klein reports

I first overheard the term two years ago, whispered by a woman in a spa locker room: "It's a six-star hotel," she bragged to a friend about a resort she had recently visited. A six-star hotel? There's no such thing, I remember thinking. Somebody's spent too much time in the steam room.

Now what once seemed a misinformed boast is being shouted from the rooftops: The six-star hotel has arrived! Magazine and newspaper articles pant breathlessly over unheard-of levels of luxury, and travel Web sites chug with news of properties offering a new standard of personalized service and amenities (such as sunglass valets to shine your shades at the pool). Last December, the Wall Street Journal reported that Horst Schulze, the man who put the ritz in Ritz-Carlton, was planning a chain of six-star hotels that would launch this year (Schulze denies the six-star claim), and Hong Kong developer Stanley Ho is reportedly opening a six-star property in Macau. Shangri-La recently announced that it will open a six-star hotel in Muscat, Oman, before year's end, and the luxury One&Only group uses the designation to market its resorts in such far-flung paradises as Mauritius and the Maldives. Even China's Hainan Island is developing a six-star golf resort.

But no ratings system actually awards more than five stars—diamonds in the case of the American Automobile Association (AAA)—and only a handful of properties are able to attain that rating. "We've never had a property score one hundred percent," notes Shane O'Flaherty, vice president of quality assurance for the Mobil Travel Guide series, which rates North American properties. "In our world, when you achieve five stars that's perfection. There are only thirty-one Mobil five-star hotels, so we don't see a need for a six-star rating. It's more of a public relations thing." Rival AAA agrees. "It sounds like marketing," says Michael Petrone, director of tourism information development.

Could all of the buzz over six-star luxury be mass delusion brought on by marketers? Or are we witnessing the birth of a category of luxury so far beyond anything we've known that it can only be summed up by creating another star? To find out, we went to Florida and compared the experience of staying in a four-star hotel (the Mandarin Oriental, Miami), a five-star hotel (the Four Seasons, Palm Beach), and Miami Beach's new ultraluxury Setai, the only hotel in the country widely reported to be of six-star caliber.

Many leaders in the luxury hotel market, however, have already made up their minds. "Six stars, if anything, is a state of mind," says Paul McManus, CEO of Leading Hotels of the World, a consortium that represents The Setai and 420 other luxury properties that he categorizes as five-star. "It's beyond a guest's expectations. If there's an official six-star designation, I don't know about it."