Hoteliers should be using the pandemic travel downturn to diversify their offering and forge greater connections with their local community. That’s the view of luxury travel expert, Mary Gostelow.

“I was lured back to Tuscany for the launch of Toscana Resort Castelfalfi’s new golf clubhouse but the highlight turned out to be truffle hunting, which is, unusually, year-round.”

Want to feel you own, momentarily, an English country house? The Pig at Harlyn Bay, which opened on 31 July 2020, is already the hottest rural find in the UK. This 17th-century house, 500 metres from one of Cornwall’s best sandy surf beaches, has become the seventh comfortable paradise in The Pig family.

I dream, like many, of returning to Sabi Sand Singita Ebony Lodge, situated on 18,000 hectares bordered by the Sabi and Sand rivers in northeastern South Africa. I remember from last time that it’s 12 thatched villas are an Olympian feat of vertical support poles growing out of precipitously steep undergrowth, ingeniously evolving, as if organically, around massive living trees. On to these vertical supports are joined a series of horizontal boardwalk platforms with lots of connecting stairs and shade or ceiling is supplied by some upper wood blocks and overall an open-sided and open-ended thatched cathedral ceiling. I look out at the view and say “wow” for the first of countless times.

“When it’s time to return to Europe, think about putting Amsterdam on the itinerary. You may well have done it before but there is always some new to blend with the old.”

Want to learn Mongolian cooking or how to make a bow and arrow and then use them? Want to talk to Mongolian herders with a translator on the ground? Now, you can do it from the comfort of your Victoria verandah or wherever else you live.

I entered Six Senses Douro Valley at the top, on the eighth floor, and looked through picture windows at hillsides of terraced vineyards.

Andaz Tokyo Toranomon Hills is a 164-room hotel that stresses indigenous, which includes elevator cabin walls decorated with Tai fish made of white washi paper, as a sign of “celebration” in the Japanese tradition. We soared up to the 51st floor lobby-reception and changed elevators, down to the 50th floor to find room #5028, identified by four protruding digits 20 centimetres off the floor.

As soon as it opened in October 2015, the 317-room Four Seasons Hotel Seoul, owned by Mirae, became a magnet for wealthy Koreans. My 72-square-metre corner suite had an amazing view of Gwanghwamun Palace and onto the distant hills – thanks to my 10 sweeping windows.

I wanted to see what makes the 4,750-room Wynn Las Vegas work from a luxury point of view; the arrival boded well. RVP Ramesh Sadhwani, a skilled GM who had many years of experience with Four Seasons, was standing at the Towers entrance. We went through a small Chelsea Flower Show of floribunda and a marbled, single-floor lobby and then a private access specialist took me up to suite #5403.

The Steigenberger Frankfurter Hof’s Mercedes glides around Willy Brandt Platz and I gaze up at the six-floor building’s Ehrenhof terrace and stone gargoyles. At Bethmannstrasse, the door is opened by an ambassador type in a full morning suit and top hat. I tread around a gold floor plaque marked 1876, the hotel’s birth year, and ascend eight red-carpet steps to the lobby. Room keys now have a floral pattern, replicated on the Bucherer-sponsored folder around them.

Ten years ago, The Ritz-Carlton Shanghai, Pudong, opened on 21 June 2010 at precisely 11.08am. It is still an Art Deco jewel, on the upper floors of the César Pelli-designed 58-floor International Financial Centre IFC in Shanghai’s Pudong business area.