Two Mexican Resorts Just Earned Travel's Toughest Rating — and They're Right Next Door to Each Other
AAA's newest Five Diamond list features two resorts sharing a stretch of Mexico's Riviera Nayarit coast: One&Only Mandarina and Rosewood Mandarina.
AAA has named its latest round of Five Diamond hotels, and two of the newest winners sit side by side on Mexico's Riviera Nayarit coast: One&Only Mandarina and Rosewood Mandarina, both in El Monteon, Nayarit. A third Five Diamond honor went to a restaurant, The Catbird Seat in Nashville.
The Five Diamond designation is the top rung of one of travel's most demanding rating systems. Since 1937, AAA inspectors have made unannounced visits to hotels and restaurants across North America, the Caribbean and Costa Rica, grading them in person against what AAA calls the four Cs: cleanliness, comfort, cuisine and consistency. The bar is high enough that only about 145 hotels worldwide currently hold the rating.
Having two of them share a single master-planned development in Mexico is unusual, and it underscores how quickly Riviera Nayarit has moved into the top tier of the country's luxury map. The stretch of Pacific coast north of Puerto Vallarta has drawn a run of high-end resorts in recent years, and the twin Mandarina wins give the area rare bragging rights.
AAA also added three Four Diamond hotels this round — Mystic Lake Casino Hotel in Minnesota, Sun Valley Lodge in Idaho and The Crescent at Turning Stone in New York — along with three Four Diamond restaurants, among them Moxi in San Miguel de Allende. In all, AAA now counts roughly 1,750 Four Diamond hotels alongside its far more exclusive Five Diamond roster.