I stayed for four nights at Aman-Summer Palace in September 2012, and felt the positives significantly outweighed the negatives:

- The service, particularly by the F&B staff, was on par with the best I have ever experienced at Aman or Four Seasons or elsewhere. Our names were used (and there were 4 different last names to keep track of in our party), our preferences were remembered, and the staff were warm and caring. Only Amantaka and Amanfayun have achieved similarly stratospheric service standards in my experience of Aman resorts.

- The facilities are so impressive -- the experience of the screening room, the pool, the spa facilities, the large and light-filled gym. It's all really wonderful. The public areas are also very atmospheric and beautifully decorated, although I do wish that the lighting in the evenings at the bar terrace overlooking the lily pond was more sensitive and atmospheric, instead of the harsh, glaring, yellow lights they turn on.

I'd never seen photos of this gorgeous underground area adjacent to the screening room and near the spa. It was always entirely empty, and since the spa's glaring faulty is its absence of a relaxation area for tea, reading, and napping after a treatment, I'd recommend they use this area for that purpose:



And here is the lily pond that abuts the bar and its terrace -- gorgeous by day, but garish and harshly lit by night:



And a view of the set-up for the daily calligraphy class offered in the cultural pavilion:



- I agree that the guest accommodations are a step down from 5-star standards, and the bathrooms in particular are in need of a refurbishment. We stayed in a Courtyard Suite, the top accommodation apart from their presidential, and it was starting to show its age, with damaged/stained wooden furniture, chipped/broken hardware in the bathroom.

- I thought the food was slightly better than what I've experienced at other Amans, where I have never felt the food is consistently great. Some dishes were delicious, many were average, and a few were not good at all.

- Our biggest disappointment was the quality of the excursions. We'd expected that Aman would provide bespoke, tailored, unique access and experiences, but the tour of the Forbidden City was a total dud, less informative and interesting than the audio guide I used last time. For the Great Wall, they provide two excursions. They avoid the very touristy sections (Badaling and Mutianyu) and instead give you the option of a the restored section that is farthest from Beijing (Jinshanling, about 2-3 hours away) or if you want assurance that there will be no one around, they will take you to a non-restored section for rugged hiking, but it is a section that has not been restored, so from the pictures they showed us seemed to lack the grandeur of the restored sections. So we opted for their Jinshanling tour.

Here's the sort scenery you get at the Jinshanling sector of the Great Wall:



We loved that section of the Wall, but again, the credit belongs to the Wall and not Aman, as there was nothing special about the excursion and, in fact, the "picnic lunch in a gazebo" element of that excursion was a debacle -- a concrete platform surrounded by locals' underwear hanging on laundry lines. They need to re-think their excursions entirely and talk with some other Aman resorts about how to do this sort of thing properly.

Here's a glimpse of where/how they set up the picnic lunch next to the Great Wall parking lot:



One of my favorite experiences at an Aman resort is the special dinners or breakfasts they can arrange in scenic locations, and when we inquired about this, they indicated that they do have a relationship with the Chinese government whereby they can rent a tower in the Summer Palace for a private dinner. We made this arrangement, and while the food was wonderful -- all the more amazing given that it was cooked in the tower by Aman's head chef without the aid of an open flame -- the Chinese restrictions on the tower (since it is a historic structure) meant no candles, so it wasn't quite as atmospheric as other Aman dinners, but was still quite nice, albeit in retrospect not worth the hefty rental fee we paid to use the tower. Here's the tower itself:



And here is a view of the dining set-up atop the tower:



And if you're curious about Aman's back-door entrance to the Summer Palace, here's it is -- a corridor that runs alongside the back of the Aman compound and through which you can enter the Summer Palace grounds, which at all hours are mobbed, but the sunrise period in which the locals are exercising in groups is really wonderful to see.

The corridor from Aman to the Summer Palace:



And the Summer Palace itself, right after sunrise: