Welcome to our second annual Smart Luxury Awards, a compendium of our very favorite smart splurges and great values from around the globe. These vastly different places all share one thing in common, an ineffable ability to be the best in their location and provide a truly distinctive experience.
At Sherman’s Travel, we spend an inordinate amount of time snooping around hotels, dissecting restaurants, and sizing up destinations. When a worthy place makes it into the magazine, it enters the Sherman’s pantheon. For our second annual Smart Luxury Awards, this process took on an added layer of scrutiny. We asked our supremely discriminating and ruthless editors and writers to nominate the standouts from the past year — the hotels, restaurants, and experiences that struck them as particularly special. The resulting maelstrom was not for the faint of heart. Favorites were championed; early contenders fell by the wayside; dark horses emerged. A list coalesced, which was then further probed and refined. Finally, the Smart Luxury Awards winners were decided and peace reigned in the land, or at least in our office. And what an impressive list it is — not comprehensive, by any means, but intimate and surprising: from a seven-room 15th-century mansion turned boutique hotel in Rethymno, Crete, to New Zealand’s lesser-known red wine country on the North Island.
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