Best in Business: 10 Hotel Brands Making Work Trips Spectacular

By its very virtue, each of the 430 hotels that bear the LHW insignia is independent and unique. The one thing they all share: a passing grade on an industry-setting, 800-point inspection that guarantees luxury service of an exceptional caliber. The appeal (and amenities) may change from hotel to hotel, but that—along with impressive quality control—is what this brand is all about.

Business travelers at St. Regis hotels get a small army to cater to their every need, from legal secretaries to translators and notaries (there are three full-time notaries on staff at the New York location). If that weren’t enough, there’s also butler service for clothes pressing and shoe shining, and a concierge team that’s equipped to handle large group reservations and transportation. In other words, everything (and everyone) is covered.

Ritz-Carlton has an enormous global portfolio—made bigger by the fact that its parent company, Marriott, has thousands of hotels around the world. But it’s also a company that taps into corporate responsibility: it donates ten percent of its conference-driven guest room proceeds to charity. One half goes to the Community Footprints Fund, which works with hunger and poverty relief, and the remainder goes to a charity designated by the meeting organizer.

If you’re one of those travelers who hops the globe from hotel room to hotel room, you’ll want to know about Luxury Collection’s Luggage Liaison, a white-glove amenity that includes both shipping and unpacking services. Also brilliant: as part of the Starwood Preferred Guest loyalty program, you can earn SPG points for Uber rides anywhere in the world.

The standout feature for business travelers checking into Conrad lives right on guests’ smartphones. The incredibly useful Conrad app is designed for the time-crunched: it lets you download a mobile room key, arrange wake-up calls, order your preferred pillow firmness, or request tech support for a meeting space. And since time is of the essence, Conrad tends to position its hotels right in the heart of a city’s business district (it was the first five-star brand to make the now-trendy push into New York’s FiDi, for instance).

Hyatt’s top tier brand focuses on giving you a taste of the destination you’re in, even if you never get a chance to leave the hotel. For instance, the bar at the Park Hyatt Tokyo has one of the best Japanese whisky lists anywhere, while in New York, you can listen to a Carnegie Hall concert from underwater speakers in the hotel’s 25th-floor pool.

Every Four Seasons hotel treats its business travelers a little differently. At the Lisbon property, guests get pocket-sized portable Wi-Fi hotspots so they can stay connected sans-roaming plan. In Paris, room service is guaranteed to arrive in 15 minutes flat. And in Vancouver, you can set up team bonding experiences in the form of personalized group workouts.

If a day full of meetings has your shoulders in knots, take to the Mandarin Oriental spa, which specializes in stress-busting treatments for business travelers (among other things). Their Calm Mind Experiences combine acupressure and meditative breathing techniques to get you back to your A-game in less than an hour.

Stay at a Shangri-La hotel, and you can expect fast, free Wi-Fi everywhere—even in the courtesy cars that pick you up from the airport. But just as attractive is the company’s Golden Circle loyalty program, which lets guests earn (and instantly redeem) points on in-house meals and spa treatments. Power lunches and mani-meetings never felt so good.

Stay at any of the brand’s 10 properties, and you’ll be in great shape to ace your board meeting and have some time on the town. Here, it’s the little things that count: desks are impeccably stocked with everything from color printers to scanners and staple removers, and room service can be ordered around the clock. Once you’ve whizzed through your appointments, the Peninsula Academy arranges VIP experiences that give you a deep dive on a destination without the time commitment (think one-hour cooking lessons with the chef of Chicago’s three Michelin star restaurant, Grace).