Best hotels in Panama City | A Curated Visual Guide to Top Stays

Welcome to PressBeyond, the ultimate curated visual guide for design-driven hotels! My name is Will Miller and these are my recommendations for the best boutique and luxury hotels in Panama City.

I am the founder of PressBeyond and I am an ultra-meticulous hotel curator who loves clean visuals. I have individually analyzed and tiered each hotel included in this guide based on a variety of criteria (architecture & design, location, brand & brand affiliation, existing reviews, and my own personal experiences), and importantly, I have hand-selected the leading imagery for each hotel to provide you with easily-digestible, yet detailed and complete, like-for-like, high-level visual profiles. I felt this summarization step was a critical missing piece across existing guides, blogs, and booking platforms. My aim is to make it easier for people to identify hotel environments that resonate with them, along with enabling them to visualize the types of social experiences that those environments help foster. My brain doesn't work when exposed to cluttered content, so my goal was to create the opposite.

Underneath this, we are also a full booking engine offering 5% Venmo cash back along with other exclusive perks. For all of you design-obsessed hotel enthusiasts out there, I hope this guide helps get you to where you see yourself!

An Overview of the Boutique & Luxury Hotel Landscape in Panama City

Casco Viejo and the Financial District sit only a few kilometers apart, but the distance between them is architectural and temporal in equal measure. The old quarter, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997, is a catalog of Spanish colonial facades, French Baroque influences, and decades of deliberate decay followed by careful recuperation. It is here that the American Trade Hotel makes its strongest argument — a 1917 building on Plaza Herrera that the Ace Hotel group reimagined in 2015, working with Commune Design to preserve the original structure's deep-set loggias and worn terrazzo while threading a quiet contemporary sensibility through the interiors. The Jazz Foundation of America holds residency here, which gives the public spaces a cultural weight that most hotels in the region don't attempt. It is the most considered property on this list, and arguably the most specific to its place. The Financial District — a thicket of glass towers that began rising in earnest through the 1990s and has never really stopped — operates on an entirely different logic. The Waldorf Astoria Panama occupies the tower formerly known as the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower, designed by Arias, Serna y Saravia and completed in 2011 in the shape of a billowing sail. The building's formal ambition belongs to an era of signature-tower excess, and the Waldorf brand has since absorbed it into something more conventionally polished. The W Panama, also in this district, works with the neighborhood's corporate energy rather than against it, offering the brand's familiar vocabulary of saturated color and nightlife-adjacent programming — coherent enough on its own terms, though less architecturally particular than either of its stablemates on this list. What these three properties together reveal is a city genuinely split between two modes of self-presentation: one rooted in history and surface patina, the other oriented toward a skyline built for international capital. For a design-conscious traveler, that split is the thing most worth understanding before booking. The American Trade Hotel asks you to slow down and inhabit the physical memory of a place. The Waldorf and the W ask you to look outward at the Pacific and the canal, at a Panama that measures itself against Miami and Singapore rather than its own colonial past. Neither orientation is wrong — but they are not interchangeable, and the choice between Casco Viejo and the Financial District is really a choice about which city you came to be in.

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Waldorf Astoria Panama

Panama City • Financial District • OPTIMIZE

avg. $189 / night

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Hilton Honors™ property

Waldorf Astoria Panama Design Editorial

Rising from Panama City's financial district as a slender dark-glazed tower in a skyline already crowded with vertical ambition, the Waldorf Astoria Panama carries the peculiar challenge of translating a brand synonymous with Manhattan grandeur into a city whose identity is built on equatorial energy and Canal-era commerce. The building's stepped massing — a broad podium giving way to a narrower upper shaft, articulated by horizontal banding and inset balcony grilles at the mid-section — gives it a sculptural legibility among its neighbors, the illuminated WA logotype at the crown marking its presence against the blue dusk of the Pacific watershed. Inside, the interiors move toward a warm neutrality rather than the brand's traditionally heavier European register. Guest rooms are finished in honeyed oak veneers and cream-toned carpets woven in a loose grid pattern, the headboard walls layered with mirrored panels and brushed brass detailing that catches the city light streaming through floor-to-ceiling glazing. Suites open into sitting areas furnished with woven-rattan accent chairs and abstract tropical canvases in malachite and gold. The mid-level terrace restaurant deploys powder-coated rattan chairs and white bistro tables beneath a retractable canvas awning, the Panama City towers arranged behind like a theatre flat. The rooftop pool deck, clad in travertine and flanked by warm-toned timber screen walls, dissolves the boundary between lap pool and city — blue-lit water meeting the illuminated grid of Marbella beyond the glass balustrade.

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American Trade Hotel

Panama City • Casco Viejo • OPTIMIZE

avg. $197 / night

Includes $10 / night in cash back

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American Trade Hotel Design Editorial

Casco Viejo, Panama City's UNESCO-listed colonial quarter, has been fighting its own erasure for decades — a neighborhood of crumbling republican-era mansions and forgotten plazas slowly reclaimed by developers and idealists in roughly equal measure. The American Trade Hotel, which took over a restored 1917 building facing Plaza Herrera when it opened in 2013, belongs firmly in the idealist camp. The project came from Ace Hotel — then at the height of its cultural influence — working with Roman and Williams on the interiors, and the result is exactly what you'd hope from that pairing: a five-floor, 50-room property that wears its history without being consumed by it. The facade's white plasterwork, arched balconies, and dark hip roof carry the building's early twentieth-century Canal Zone character intact, glowing warmly against the Casco skyline at dusk. Inside, Roman and Williams balanced preservation instincts against their signature layering of periods and textures. Encaustic cement tiles in indigo and cream pattern the restaurant and bar floors — a direct reference to the Cuban and Spanish colonial influences threaded through Panamanian vernacular architecture. Guestrooms pair walnut headboards and dark-stained wide-plank floors with articulated swing-arm lamps in the Bestlite tradition and indigo block-print cushions, the atmosphere closer to a well-edited Panama City apartment than to conventional hotel design. Upper-floor rooms frame panoramic views across the Casco rooftops toward the Pacific, binoculars left casually on the writing desk suggesting the hotel knows exactly where its guests will want to look.

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W Panama

Panama City • Financial District • OPTIMIZE

avg. $156 / night

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Marriott Bonvoy® property

W Panama Design Editorial

Panama City's financial district skyline at night tells you something about the country's ambitions — towers of dark glass packed together along Calle 50, each competing for height and reflectivity. W Panama, set within one such tower in the Marbella neighbourhood, leans into that energy rather than softening it, its all-glass curtain wall catching and fragmenting the city lights in the exterior image here like a mirror turned on itself. Inside, the design deploys the W brand's characteristic layering of local cultural reference over an international contemporary framework. The guest rooms are fitted with light ash wood-effect floors, platform beds with under-lighting in warm amber, and woven rattan pendant lights that appear throughout — a motif borrowed loosely from Panamanian craft tradition — alongside upholstered swivel chairs in red-and-white geometric fabric that punctuate the otherwise white-and-black palette. The mola-inspired cushion details on the beds nod toward the textile traditions of the Guna people. At the elevated restaurant, floor-to-ceiling glazing frames the downtown towers at dusk, with banks of those same tiered rattan pendants suspended at varying heights above burnt-orange banquette seating and tan leather dining chairs. The rooftop wet deck carries blue sun loungers and louvered white cabanas against the full panorama of the city's vertical spread — a configuration that makes the skyline itself the primary design gesture.