Picking the perfect place to stay in Chicago, Chile, or China is no easy matter…unless you consult Conde Nast Traveler Magazine's thirteenth annual Gold List.

Almost 21,000 Conde Nast Traveler subscribers completed the 2006 Readers' Choice Survey, thereby selecting the world's top hotels and resorts, for the rankings in their November issue. To get at the nuances behind the numbers, they contacted readers to discover precisely what made a specific room, view, or locale nonpareil.

The upshot? This list of heart-stirring havens, here and abroad.

Entries include the edited comments of readers of Conde Nast Traveler Magazine and are intended to reveal a property's character rather than to catalog its facilities. Each score represents the percentage of respondents who rated a property excellent or very good on specific criteria.

The Gold List is based on data collected from the annual Conde Nast Traveler Readers' Survey; to qualify for inclusion in these rankings, a property had to receive a required minimum number of responses.