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anatomy of a fab Hotel
The Arrival
This is the easiest way to sink a hotel’s standing in a review. In the past, hosting hotels tend to send their cars to ensure the arrival experience is flawless but these days, not too many hotels maintain their own fleet so arrivals are often on our own dime. At the entrance, I expect porters to be on stand-by to help with the door and the luggages ALWAYS. At the check-in counter, the front desk staff have to be efficient and expeditious. Welcome touches like a cold or hot towel and a drink greatly enhance an arrival experience. Luggages must be efficiently managed and the check-in process should be clear, speedy and painless. An arrival fraught with uncertainties, ambiguities and (gasp!), rudeness, will result in a straight fail. At a hotel where the PR department is competent, there will usually be a welcome party at the door and check-in is always pleasant and quick as lightning. Old hands are aware this tract is fraught with landmines so they know extra care and attention is needed. When the first impression is bad, what can anyone expect for the rest of the stay?
Breakfast
I don’t like to wake up for breakfast and I hate crowding around buffet tables jostling for eggs and bacon, but while I am on the job, I tend to go for breakfast at least once just to know the competency level of the hotel for this essential service. Breakfast is another landmine-prone area of a hotel because it is always crowded as guests jam into the buffet lanes from the early hours. The first mark of trouble is when the queue at the door is long and the seating process is chaotic. Hotels sometimes make the fundamental mistake of planting younglings and a host of unsuitable characters at the door to facilitate seating. Meeting a cheerless sour face early in the morning who grills you with questions instead of welcoming you is a horrid start to the day. Nonchalance is also a cardinal fault - I get really riled up when the staff just shushes you into a room with no table, cutleries or explanations. Lastly, it may be a buffet spread but an offer of coffee, juice or tea after being seated would be really nice. Some hotels offer an a la carte menu on the side which is a nice touch because that usually means a smaller buffet spread and less food wastage. Smaller hotels can also do away with the buffet spreads altogether and just offer room service and a la carte breakfasts.
I usually head to the club for breakfast if it is available because I am not a big eater and hate crowds generally. Club breakfasts are not very extensive but in the past they tend to offer more premium entrees and fruits. The most memorable breakfasts I reckon are the ones the Japanese luxury hotels in Tokyo proffers. At the Park Hyatt Tokyo, I always have at least one breakfast in the room, which was staged with grand sophistication with masterfully ripened muskmelon slices and bagel with cream cheese and salmon. At the Mandarin Oriental Tokyo, I counted 8 different types of Japanese fruits at the station, including cherries, pineapples, melons and mikan.
Out of Japan, Shangri-la breakfasts are usually worth waking up for - piping hot dim sum, home-made carved ham and fresh whole coconuts are some of the delights I’ve savoured just recently at Nashan Shangri-la in Shenzhen. I also remember with fondness the lovely breakfast laid out at the Valley Wing of Shangri-la Singapore - laksa, nasi lemak and champagne. No one on the island can inject so much sophistication into street grubs quite like the Valley Wing folks. Besides service, the effort to introduce variety to the breakfast spread will also be appreciated. There is this luxury hotel in Taipei that still serves more or less the same dishes for breakfast after 20 years. Even the fruits are the same in variety, shape and presentation. Familiarity is comforting but an unchanging menu that has lingered for decades is poised for contempt.
The Design Element
Fabulous hotels of the world hit you from miles away - they are usually housed in shiny new landmarks delineating the city’s horizon or restored heritage addresses tinged with history and expectations. When one enters into such premises, one should be hit with a shot of intimidating grandeur diffusing truck loads of welcome. The balance of hard and soft elements in interior design is an art that takes forever to grasp and within the space of a fabulous hotel, you’d find a masterful amalgamation of contrasts and complements, as well as familiarity in a sea of unexpected new accents. Veer but a bit off the periphery of good taste and the whole place could end up a disaster.
Aesthetics are of course personal and very subjective but designers have cardinal rules to abide by. Firstly, designs primarily convey trends that can be current or dated; sometimes the trends can linger for quite a stretch but most become passé as time progresses. This is why we value timelessness in the trade, which is as abstract as splendour and zen. Timelessness isn’t a cheap endeavour, and even the most stunning hotels have to be touched up frequently. In the context of the modern dwelling, enough cannot be said of appealing and timeless designs, which in this decade rules out colossal columns, cyclopean chandeliers, rococo flourishes, garish carpets, ornate headboards, dark wood furnishings, dated parquets, peeling wallpapers, small windows, bad lighting, ugly curtains, olden furnitures (especially rattan), anything with brown marble and most importantly, artificial plants and flowers. Short of the last onus, I think I have just described Buckingham Palace! Trying to raise a European chateau in Asia is usually an expensive and unfortunate manifestation of bad taste.
With design, the truth is really in the details. I was flabbergasted when I visited and reviewed The Murray Hong Kong in 2018 - the sensational hotel was raised to the cost of $1 billion but everywhere one turns, one sees fake florals in ghastly arrangements masquerading as the real deal. There was a new general manager coming in at that point and the first thing I said to him was ‘you know, at the tune of $1 billion, the owner can and should spring for fresh flowers.’ And he wholeheartedly agreed. Fast forward to 2024 and the GM has since exited the hotel, but the hideous blooms remain.
In China, the frequency of such hauntings are even more severe. One of my favourite chains, Shangri-la, falters greatly on this account. When the Midtown Shangri-la Hangzhou was just completed, the building featured planter boxes outside every window packed with ugly plastic creeper plants. At the Nanshan Shangri-la in Shenzhen, the chain’s most impressive property to date, the stunning lobby is more or less desecrated by pots of massive fake trees, decorative juliet balconies decked with plastic bushes and hideous arrangements of plastic hydrangeas and foxgloves slotted amongst sad looking fresh flowers. There was even a ghastly plastic hybrid peach/pear blossom at a corner in the middle of summer! It is delusional to think that the fake can appear as real and it pains my heart to see stunning hotels so needlessly tainted by PLASTIC PLANTS!
Then across the bay in Macau you find ridiculously outfitted hotels with million dollar budgets for florals - exotic peonies, vibrant dahlias, exquisite hydrangeas. There are enough fresh flowers at Wynn Palace to decorate three mid-sized hotels on any given day and the floral arrangements at the Ritz-Carlton Macau were magnificently simple yet elegant. But then again, the hotels in Macau don’t operate quite like your run-of-the-mill luxury inns. Some of the ones we have visited are all-suite roosts with 5-metre high ceilings and movement-lit bathrooms. The billionaire owners of this gaming enclave call the shots with the nuances and the accents and we all know that luxury in Macau is fed by a deep well of obscene reserves.
Service Orientation
Good service, if I may be honest, is probably the most challenging aspect of running a luxury hotel in today’s realities. In a nutshell, many service folks with experience and good sense had exited the fold and the young and inexperienced are now running the shops. They have no knowledge of the trade, no tact in their speech, no finesse in their delivery and no anticipation of anything beyond the next 5 seconds. A three-toed sloth is better equipped for life than these unmotivated rookies. Why would anyone pay a mini ransom for a room at the Peninsula if the concierge couldn’t even score them a seat at the closest Robuchon?
The exodus of capable service folks, from restaurants to front desk to housekeeping, was due largely to the long hours, low pay and constant abuse from management and customers in equal measures. It is sad, but I’ve seen service staff bear the brunt of abuse constantly when they are not in the wrong in the first place. Good service and good processes go hand in hand - when a hotel is run by imbeciles and the processes are broken, staff on the floor naturally bear the brunt of irate guests and management usually wields them like scapegoats. At some point, disillusionment and resentment will set in and many exit the fold with a heave of relief, and I don’t blame them.
Hotel folks complain about a severe lack of manpower that is putting a strain on their operations, but they fail to see the importance of properly training those they still have on their payroll because 1. there is a lack of experienced trainers and they fear that once the staff are trained, they will leave for better paying jobs. It is a vicious cycle playing out at present as more and more hotels open across the region and fewer and fewer people would contemplate a hotel job. The realities of COVID in the previous years have already drained the pool with despondency, and taking on a hotel service job today largely means getting less for doing more. Interns and trainees, incredibly, have become one of the steadiest streams of manpower for hotels today. For management they are a godsend. For guests, not so much. Kids these days dream and talk big, but are capable of little else. And their worst trait - they don’t listen.
Service used to be the most important consideration for the standing of the hotels I review. Today I more or less have to turn a blind eye to the many many letdowns because the expectations from 2 decades ago can no longer be indulged by today’s realities. Japan is the last country to keep to a high level of service distinction but even from within the echelon of top hospitality addresses there, the cracks are showing.
A recent stay at one of my favourite Tokyo luxury hotels was so bad, they invited me back for a second chance. Sadly, the second experience didn’t fare better than the first. My personal takeaway is that GOOD LEADERSHIP MATTERS. The GM there was clearly sleeping at the steer in an environment that rewards inertia over innovation. Next to that, Japan is also facing a severe shortage of manpower and foreigners now fill many ranks at this and other Japanese hotels. Some of them unfortunately bring to the service front ridiculous notions of self-aggrandisement, which go against everything imperial service stands for. I really disdain the ludicrous dynamics of the West encroaching on the East today - me too, me matters, me me me and what nots. The intricacies of good service the East is renowned for are being drowned out by an invading horde of inexperienced pretenders who baulk at hard work and offer what I call ‘service from the trenches’. This untoward development signals a tiresome and reductive revolution against the very notion of ‘service before self’. Why there is a need to take up arms against the simplest duty is baffling, but such combative mindsets look set to foment and corrode away at the foundation until the day the industry finally collapses.
But before that happens, let’s continue with our section on good service. Some of the most impressive show of good service gleaned via recent visits are from the Ritz-Carlton Shenzhen, Raffles Bali, Mandarin Oriental Tokyo, Halekulani Okinawa, The Mitsui Kyoto, The Peninsula Hong Kong, Regent Phu Quoc, Capella Hanoi and every hotel within Galaxy Macau except Andaz, JW Marriott and Okura, the latter two of which I have not reviewed. The processes in place are capably managed and the service folks know exactly which tune to sing, quite the opposite of the dummies installed at many other 5-star outcrops who repeat SOP lines and sprout inane nonsense like annoying parrots. Nobody in the business can guarantee a faultless experience over the duration of a stay but having staff who are empowered to make ad hoc, sensible decisions in the event of a mini calamity is instrumental to the recovery process.
The Room
Naturally, people check into hotels with a myriad of differing expectations but for the luxury class, excess is always on the cards. The much-touted promise of a home away from home is as clichè as it is a misnomer - homes are usually messy, perfunctory and squalid abodes where we live out our mundane existence. It would be a horror to spring for an expensive hotel room just to find it, gasp, like home!
So while many luxury hotels have stuck to selling this platitude, most of them have also spared no expense raising the most magnificent and alluring rooms bedecked with shimmering, opulent details and trimmings befitting royalties; these are not homes, these are dreams outfitted with 500 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets, bathtubs of pure white marble set next to stunning vistas and exquisite products like branded soaps and creams none of us would think to stock at home. Whereas in the past Bose speakers and Dyson hairdryers in a hotel room would be quite impressive, these days they are pretty standard issue accoutrements at the respectable establishments. Nobody would fork out a grand for a night at another home (the best airbnb lodgings and service apartments thus sell for a lot lower than luxury hotel rooms) but people constantly pay for temporal fantasies because we all crave some luxe escapades from our mundane doldrums.
In a way I believe this is why most service apartments, despite their superior size and more functional amenities that usually include the conveniences of kitchenettes and washer-dryers, still command significantly lower ADRs than luxury hotel rooms. If I am on holiday, I would like to be housed in a space that has the faintest semblances of a home. A room that is not designed to thrill the senses is just the home away from home drenched in familiar disappointments. These are just some expectations of a top-notch hotel room updated for the present age: the toilet paper must be cotton soft and embossed or neatly folded at the end, there must be hand and rain showers with one-touch push buttons stocked with Diptyque or Penhaligon products, heated toilet seats with automated bidet functions are as integral as fresh air, and the in-room views peered through floor to ceiling curtain walls must induce top-of-the-world euphoria. Well-placed power sockets are also very important - it is inexplicable that in this age of gadgets one still needs to send out a search party for power sockets in a hotel room. Those that emerge from the desk via an electronic button is a pretty impressive feature of the latest crop of new launches, a snazzy in-room accent encountered at the sensational Nanshan Shangri-la just this year (2024).
Suites are obviously a huge stride ahead from entry-level rooms and are usually reserved for the CEOs, celebrities, moneyed itinerants and certain important media. Personally, a room devoid of fresh flowers and welcome amenities is wet, even if it’s a suite. Over a review stay, I constantly leave tiny litter lying around unseen corners just to see if the housekeeping staff are the conscientious, eagle-eyed sort. Dirty cups and glasses, toilets with pee stains and finding hair that are evidently not yours on the bed or in the bathtub are some of the biggest and most disturbing faux pas of housekeeping. Also, luxury hotels that don’t offer turndown service and bedside dainties in the evening are quite like champagne without bubbles.
The Gourmet Index
For the longest time, hotels are expected to be raised replete with the city’s best restaurants and drinking holes. While the latter expectation is still more or less valid, restaurant conception and operations are facing an uphill task keeping up with the sterling independents sprouting like mushrooms across the modern culinary landscapes.
People often react to hotel restaurants with vastly different opinions - they either love them or hate them. To some, hotel restaurants are overpriced hoity-toity places only tourists would patronise. To others, hotel restaurants are fabulous culinary institutions unmatched by local joints - they come with the biggest star chefs, the hottest views, the most elevated milieu and the best service in town. The reality actually lies somewhere in the middle, closer to the idealistic end of the spectrum - hotels, especially the ones managed by the big chains, usually have more experience in FnB operations and are most likely to create and operate restaurants that are a head above the independents. They have the clout and the financial backing to hire better chefs and service folks to man the fort. Independent restaurateurs on the other hand have greater flexibility with all aspects of operation and tend to be more creative and passionate with their concepts and menus. They are also more in-tuned with the market tides and can be more reactionary when required.
After 20 years on the job, I wholeheartedly agree that resort FnB outlets are mostly revolting tourist traps. Expectedly, most of the independent restaurants around resort destinations are not great too. Personally, the worst dining experiences I have endured were at Aman resorts because they are far from everywhere and can serve guests anything and charge them any price. The modus operandi of the chain is to draw the rich in with mirages of heaven then slash them in the bleeding pen like squealing hogs. In the post-Zecha years, Aman hotels have become plainly exorbitant and overrated.
But increasingly it is more and more challenging for all hotels to maintain a full line-up of culinary options due to the severe manpower crunch the industry faces as well as the changing habits of consumers with alternative options like food delivery service on the rise. Hotel restaurants are also superbly expensive to conceptualise and operate. Many new hotels are now curtailing their own involvement in the restaurants operating under their roofs with private leases and collaborations.
Spa and Wellness
Spa and wellness aren’t exactly the top priority in our review agenda unless we are visiting luxury resorts where massages are indispensable. Reviewing spas can be a tricky business - it’s hard to be utterly candid about an experience where you are butt naked most of the time. Also, if the therapist is any good, you won’t be alert or conscious throughout the experience to register the highs.
Many people think spa reviews are the best deals of the job because they are supposed to be blissful and pampering and expensive but over the years I have also been booked into plenty of frightful affairs that are unforgettable for all the wrong reasons. At a noted spa in Kuala Lumpur, I was treated to this inexplicable session where the therapist blindfolded me and put things in my mouth before exhorting me to ‘feel the flavours and express the sensations’ like a guru on crack. Once in Bali, I had to plant rice in a muddy field under the hot sun before the massage commenced; years later in the same spa, I quite literally had my ass smoked over some sort of bizarre ritualistic cleansing. In Langkawi, an overzealous masseuse actually tore my left cornea with an unanticipated eyelid rub. The worst happened in China in a 5-star hotel spa with this young thing who knew nothing about massage or the human musculature. Her strokes were so ferociously inept, I was feeling seasick 10 minutes into the massage. The human body isn’t a Google map so if the masseuse is fumbling to find the spots then you need to get the hell out of there stat before you get maimed!
To be honest, the joys of human kneading are fast eluding this reviewer because post-COVID, I am constantly fighting a mean case of reflux and worsening OCD when I am on the massage table. There are no unfortunate “merlion” situations yet but masseuses who don't wash hands before moving from feet to crown are still a dime a dozen and when these awful faux pas happen, there will be screaming in my head. Or were they verbalised? I can’t quite tell anymore after a liberal application of eucalyptus, ginger and ylang ylang.
So what does one look out for in a heavenly spa session? Hardware is an important consideration in the overall estimation - the softness of the sheets, the plushness of the massage table, the muting of the mechanisation, the heated pads (yes they are a thing!), the availability of recreational facilities like jacuzzi and steam showers as well as the aftertreatment relaxation enclaves all add to the final tabulations. Good hygiene and the sterling skills of the masseuse is clearly the paramount factor, and it will be nice not to hear the screwing of caps or the plopping of bottle pumps over the massage - work the oil from a dish like the best of them please. Cold and clammy hands are also quintessential deal breakers. In my experience, the most fabulous spas of the continent tend to concentrate in wellness quarters like Thailand and Bali although the flashy ones in pampering enclaves like Maldives and Macau can also be very good. The St Regis Spa in Macau, for example, is a very recent and unexpectedly fabulous discovery.
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+ For a full recount, the both the print and e-book can be ordered on Kindle and Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DPL3C35P​
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