Skip the modern Vander Bar, the kind of establishment that hosts "Friday Afternoon Fiestas" where you can purchase buckets of Corona and pitchers of margaritas, for the old-school Madison Club Lounge instead.

BBC: New York City's classic hotel bars

Inside the faintly lit establishment, patrons occupy a long bar and cosy up in red leather booths while hard-working bartenders prepare pre-Prohibition inspired cocktails.

BBC: Philadelphia��s revived speakeasy scene

In fact, several of the more sophisticated spots are in hotels, including the glass-walled Blu Horizon in the Shangri-La overlooking Sydney Harbour, Hemmesphere in the Establishment Hotel and the cavernous lobby-level Water Bar in BLUE Sydney.

FORBES: Travel

Half soccer pub, half punk rock bar, Churchill's is 100% one of the most interesting spots in the city, an establishment that straddles lines of income, race and nationality - in a lot of ways, a microcosm for Miami itself.

BBC: Multicultural Miami

One of the most exciting places in Paris right now has to be Le Carmen, a cocktail bar housed in a listed building that was once home to the composer Bizet and after whose opera the establishment is named.

BBC: Paris�� burgeoning cocktail scene