Seattle-area hotel and restaurant are tops again in AAA rankings

Two Seattle-area establishments have achieved one of the hospitality industry's highest ratings, the AAA Five Diamond Award.

The Fairmont Olympic Hotel in downtown Seattle has received a AAA Five Diamond Award for the 23rd consecutive year and Woodinville's Herbfarm Restaurant for the fifth consecutive year.

AAA also announced that ten hotels and six restaurants have been added for the first time to the annual list of lodgings and eateries receiving AAA's highest rating, five diamonds.

The additions will be listed in the automobile association's 2007 TourBook guides and on AAA.com. They bring the total number of properties awarded five diamonds by AAA to 93 hotels and 58 restaurants.

The honor is accorded to just a tiny fraction of the nearly 60,000 properties that AAA inspectors rate in the United States, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean.

The lodgings earning five-diamond awards for the first time were Ojai Valley Inn & Spa, Ojai, Calif.; Falling Rock at Nemacolin Woods, Farmington, Pa.; Four Seasons Hotel Miami; The Sanctuary at Kiawah Island Golf Resort in South Carolina; The Ritz-Carlton Lodge, Reynolds Plantation, Greensboro, Ga.; Four Seasons Resort Jackson Hole — Teton Village in Wyoming; Skylofts at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas and Wynn Las Vegas; and in Mexico, Grand Velas All Suites & Spa Resort, Nuevo Vallarta, and Occidental Royal Hideaway Resort & Spa, Playa del Carmen.

Restaurants earning five diamonds for the first time were Kai, in the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Resort & Spa, in Phoenix; Cyrus, in Healdsburg, Calif.; CityZen in the Mandarin Oriental, Washington, D.C.; Joel Robuchon at The Mansion in the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, and in Chicago, Avenues in The Peninsula, and Alina.

Three lodgings on the 2007 five-diamond list have maintained their status for 31 consecutive years, since the rating was first applied to hotels. They are the Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, Ariz.; The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, Colo.; and The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va.