InterContinental Real Santo Domingo, an IHG Hotel ★★★★★

Twenty-Two Floors Above the Winston Churchill

Most visitors meet Santo Domingo through its colonial quarter and never see the rest. The rest is Piantini: towers, embassies, the financial houses, the shopping centres, and the avenue that runs through all of it. The InterContinental Real is the tall pale building at the corner of Winston Churchill and Porfirio Herrera, twenty-two floors of it, with a pool terrace cut into the lower levels and the Club rooms stacked at the top. It is a city hotel in the proper sense: it exists because the capital is a working capital, and it is very good at what that requires.

Why It Works

There is a version of the Dominican Republic that has nothing to do with sand, and it needs a hotel that takes it seriously. This is that hotel. Two hundred and twenty-seven rooms with the operational depth that implies: a twenty-four hour fitness centre, a spa, room service that answers, a concierge who knows the city, gardens and open-air banquet halls for the weddings and conferences that fill them. What convinced us is the top of the building. Four Club floors with their own lounge turn a large business hotel into something closer to a small one, and that is a rare trick at this scale.

Why This Location

Piantini is where the capital does business and shops, which means restaurants that are open on a Tuesday, pavements you can walk in the evening and shopping centres within a few minutes on foot. The Colonial Zone, with the cathedral, the Alcazar and the Calle El Conde, is about four miles south, twenty minutes in normal traffic and worth timing around the rush. Las Americas airport is the other way, east along the coast road. If your trip is meetings by day and the old city by night, this is the geometry that makes both work. If you came to swim in the sea, it is the wrong side of the island and the wrong kind of hotel.

Fast Facts

• Price: Luxe

• Vibe: Urban, polished, corporate-calm, high-floor

• Rooms: Two hundred and twenty-seven across twenty-two floors, from Classic Rooms to Club InterContinental rooms on floors nineteen to twenty-two, one-bedroom suites and Presidential Suites

• Best For: Business travellers, city breaks, and anyone using the capital as a base before or after the coast

• Our Favorite Thing About the Hotel: The Club lounge on the upper floors, which gives a two-hundred-room hotel the feel of a private one

• Dining: Nau for Japanese-inspired cooking with bento and yakitori, The Market for all-day dining, Blu as pool bar and restaurant, and a lobby bar built around its mixology

• Amenities: Infinity pool terrace, spa, twenty-four hour fitness centre with city views, sauna and hot tub, gardens and open-air banquet halls, meeting facilities, free parking

• Attractions: Piantini shopping and restaurants (walking distance), Colonial Zone and the Catedral Primada (about four miles), Malecon seafront, Las Americas airport by road

The Club Floors, and Whether to Take Them

Classic Rooms are the workhorses and they are perfectly good: quiet, well kept, high enough up to escape the avenue. The question every guest here faces is whether to move to floors nineteen through twenty-two. The Club rooms come with the lounge, and the lounge is what changes the stay: somewhere to work that is not the room, breakfast without the crowd, and the city laid out below at the hour when Santo Domingo looks best. For a stay of two nights it is a nicety. For a week of meetings it pays for itself in time saved. The suites, one-bedroom and Presidential, are the option when the room has to double as somewhere to receive people.

Nau, Blu and the Evening in Piantini

The food is better than a business hotel needs it to be. Nau does Japanese-inspired cooking, bento and yakitori, and holds its own against the independent restaurants in the neighbourhood. The Market handles the all-day work. Blu sits by the pool and doubles as a bar in the evening, which is where the hotel is most pleasant, and the lobby bar takes its cocktails seriously. Two things to weigh. This is a large hotel that hosts conferences and weddings, so the ground floor can be busy in a way the upper floors never are. And Piantini is a district of towers, not of charm, so the postcard version of the city is a taxi ride away.