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The hotel world is awash in business activity, with properties being snapped up apace, but what matters most to a traveler remains the frontline experience. Every year the peripatetic voters in Institutional Investor's World's Best Hotels survey report on who's providing top-flight service, finding it this year in 64 cities. (Eight are new since 2004: Basel; Beirut; Hamburg; Honolulu; Johannesburg; Key Biscayne, Florida; St. Petersburg; and Taipei.)