Camino Real Antigua

The room was cold at night, and I couldn’t get it warm enough. Everything else was great: the location is near everything but secluded from the noise, and the property is very well maintained. The gym surprisingly had almost everything you’d want, coffee was available free all day, and the staff were super nice.

Breakfast was incredible and great value, and the staff were lovely and couldn’t do enough for us. The hotel is gorgeous, with spacious, well-kept rooms, high ceilings, and lovely courtyards. It’s well located for walking around Antigua, and there’s parking for hotel guests.

Camino Real Antigua delivers an unusually luxurious stay while still feeling deeply rooted in Guatemala. The service stood out most for me. Staff were warm and attentive when needed, without hovering, and the care felt sincere rather than scripted. Breakfast was delicious and thoughtfully prepared, too. The rooms are stunning, with soaring ceilings and exposed dark beams. The bed was almost indecently comfortable, piled with soft linens and full goose-down pillows. Even the bathroom feels special, with a vaulted brick ceiling and arched skylights that fill it with natural light. It brought to mind both a Roman bath and a Guatemalan colonial chapel. The property’s many courtyards are magnificent. One has a stone fountain, trimmed hedges, and timber colonnades. Another is lush with palms and bright magenta bougainvillea, with a velvet lawn and an iron bench set aside for a quiet moment. The serpentine pool has deep cobalt tiles and sits against old stone walls under the dramatic Guatemalan sky. The architecture throughout feels lovingly connected to Antigua’s heritage, from the terracotta roof tiles and ochre walls to the iron window grilles draped in ferns and hand-carved wooden columns. The arched corridors, warm plaster, and dark beams make it feel like walking through a grand hacienda or a living museum of colonial craftsmanship. I’ve stayed at plenty of hotels, including Four Seasons and Ritz-Carlton, and the service here can stand alongside the best of them. The Camino Real Antigua feels like Guatemala at its most luxurious, without losing its local character. An absolute must.

The hotel grounds are beautiful, and the grounds and restaurant staff were super friendly. The front desk service was another story, extremely rude and unhelpful. My husband and I got food poisoning during our stay, and at 5 a.m., when nothing was open, they wouldn’t even provide Gatorade. The AC in our room also broke, leaving a smoky smell. We slept in that smoky room with asthma on our last night, and the hotel neither moved us nor discounted the night. We also had trouble ordering food, and they wanted to charge us double when the order was wrong. I was very disappointed with the front desk and our stay overall, aside from the grounds. With all these issues, they still didn’t offer us any discount on the night.