Hotel Reviews

As someone who enjoys making the most of his Marriott Titanium Elite status benefits I normally book Marriott properties for my trips but, on this occasion, booking the Conrad Centennial Singapore made a lot more sense.

Bangkok is one of the more economical cities in the world to visit because food is ridiculously cheap and good accommodation doesn’t have to be expensive – there are a lot of good properties to choose from in the city and you won’t have to break the bank to stay at a lot of them.

A few weeks back Joanna, MJ and I spent six nights in a King Suite at the Andaz West Hollywood. It's a property I know quite well (having lived down the road from it for 5 years) and it's a property I've stayed at a few times in the past....but never with Joanna and MJ. I've already discussed why we booked the Andaz how much it cost in a previous post so I'll move straight on to the review.

Some time ago I visited Sao Paulo on a crazy itinerary that saw me spend as many nights on American Airlines aircraft as I did in Sao Paulo (I earned a lot of miles and elite qualifying miles on that trip!) but, rather annoyingly, the flash drive on which I stored all my pictures became corrupted and so I haven't been able to publish any reviews...until now. I've finally managed to recover my files from the Sao Paulo trip so I thought I'd share the pictures I took of the Grand Hyatt and add add my thoughts on teh service and the property.

Joanna, MJ and I had a night in London over the Holidays and we decided to use some of my Hilton Honors points to book a stay at the Hilton London Canary Wharf. I rarely stay at Hilton properties so I've had a balance of around 80,000 Honors points sitting in my account for some time (most of the points came from a sign-up bonus for the free Hilton Amex credit card) and this seemed like a good time to use them.

I only had three nights in Sydney on this trip so it was important to me that I booked somewhere central and within an easy walk of most things I'd like to see and do while I was in town. I was also keen to spend as little as possible while still enjoying a good amount of comfort so that meant booking a property with points and with a chain at which I have status. All of this made the Sydney Harbour Marriott a logical place to stay.

Auckland is one of those cities where you’ll find it pretty hard to use most of the well known hotel loyalty currencies as, aside from a Hilton and a Crowne Plaza, there aren’t any other centrally located hotels that are part of one of one of the large international chains. It’s because of this that I found myself booking the SkyCity Grand Hotel for a two-night stay I had in Auckland.

I normally don't have more than one or two reasons for booking a particular hotel but, in the case of the JW Marriott Singapore South Beach, I had four very good reasons for wanting to visit. Firstly I wanted to use up some of my Marriott Rewards points, secondly I wanted a property where we would be making the most of my hotel status (I  have Platinum status with Marriott), thirdly the hotel looked to have a convenient location and finally I don't think any of the bigger blogs has reviewed this property yet - it's still reasonably new.

I booked the JW Marriott Hong Kong for a number of reasons but the two main ones were that I'd heard good things about the property overall and I'd heard good things about the Executive Lounge that, as a Marriott Platinum member, I would have access too. After a good Business Class flight from Tokyo I was looking forward to finding out if the hotel lived up to the reviews.

In an earlier post I explained the thinking behind my decision to give up a reservation at the Park Hyatt Tokyo in favor of the Hyatt Regency Tokyo so this was the hotel Joanna and I stayed at on our recent trip. I reviewed this Hyatt Regency earlier in the year so another full review seems a little pointless...instead I thought I'd share a little more info and some pictures of our room as it was slightly different to the room I had earlier in the year.