The 3 Best Luxury Hotels in Sarasota

What our travel advisors arrange most often in Sarasota is the morning at the Ringling Museum – not for the circus but for the Rubens cartoons a circus proprietor bought in the 1920s when nobody else wanted them.

Then: Ca’ d’Zan, the Ringlings’ residence, modelled on a Venetian palazzo; Siesta Key with its quartz sand; the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens with one of the largest orchid collections in the world; St. Armands Circle for an evening stroll; the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, lavender and shell-shaped; and Myakka River State Park, where a canopy walkway crosses the oak woods.

And the cooking of the Gulf coast, plainer than its reputation and better than its prices: the grouper sandwich, on every corner and rarely the same twice; stone crab claws between October and May, where only the claw is taken and the animal goes back; Gulf shrimp; and key lime pie, whose sharpness comes from a lime smaller than a golf ball.

At all three hotels breakfast, an upgrade subject to availability, a late check-out and Marriott Bonvoy are part of the stay – four benefits with no gap. A welcome gift is added at The Sarasota Modern and the Art Ovation Hotel Sarasota.

Breakfast is served at The Sarasota Modern in Wink Wink Food & Drink and at The Ritz-Carlton Sarasota in Jack Dusty.

And the real advantage of this destination is not one that appears on a benefit list: that every property at a destination belongs to the same group happens at only seven of 340 destinations. So here you can decide by the property rather than by the programme – just tell our travel advisors what kind of property it should be.