World's most expensive hotels

Provocateur Suite, Hard Rock Hotel, Las Vegas

Price: $3,500 a night during the week; $7,500 on weekends

The Layout: This suite with two bedrooms (mirrored ceilings in both, of course) is designed as a palace in which to indulge the lower urges—and it’s a riot. You are greeted upon entry by black-vinyl walls and an S&M table. A dark anteroom between the foyer and the master bath features a cage big enough to hold a full-grown man and a set of manacles on chains (but no way to fasten them). The living room has an inlaid carpet made of old black-leather belts.

Bragging Rights: The rumor last June was that Duran Duran had recently checked in.

Favorite Things: A tiled hot tub on a terrace, and planes flying by so close that they look like toys you could pluck from the sky.

Royal Etihad Suite, ­Jumeirah at Etihad Towers, Abu Dhabi

: $18,000 per night

The Layout: This four-bedroom, six-bathroom, two–dining room suite takes up the entire sixtieth floor and is so opulent that your eyes pop out on stalks—from the mounds of dates, cookies, and petit fours to the raised green marble tub in one of the bathrooms.

Service: Charming, capable, and proud.

Bragging Rights: The suite has been occupied so little since the marble-lined private ­elevator first opened into these filthy rich rooms that there’s barely a fingerprint on the many iPads that you can use to close the sheers or summon the butler.

Favorite Things: The Audi A6 ­airport pickup, the copious Hermès toiletries, and the views.

The Presidential Suite, Waldorf Astoria, New York City

Price: Starts at $10,000 per night

The Layout: It’s like staying in a small wing of the Smithsonian. There’s the small, wooden rocking chair given as a gift by John F. Kennedy, between the fireplace and Eisenhower’s desk. In the bedroom—modest in size and somber in décor—you can draft a speech at General MacArthur’s desk, which dates back to the years when he lived at the Waldorf with his wife. Strangely, the windows, that look out onto unremarkable midtown scenes, are not state-of-the-art bullet-proof. The suite contains four bedrooms total, each with a separate key.

Bragging Rights: There are so-called presidential suites all over the globe, but this is the only one where every US president since Herbert Hoover has spent the night.

Favorite Things: The interior looks not unlike the Oval Office, decorated in creams and golds and blues, following the presidential seal—which you’ll find on plates in the dining room’s breakfront and etched into glass on the sconces in the living room.

Splitting Hairs: The hyper-selective booking process. The hotel will obtain background information on new guests to ensure that he or she is "well-known" through either frequency of previous stays and/or fame, and will treat the priceless property with respect. Those who've passed muster: J. K. Rowling, whose seven-volume Harry Potter series sits alongside works by Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon; a Chinese man of means who is obsessed with US history; and special friends of the Waldorf.