Elegant Park Hotel Farrer Park is an ideal four-star hotel in Singapore for the leisure, business and even medical traveller. The hotel has 300 rooms in a 20-storey tower situated just across the street from a hospital. Service is excellent, particularly at Reception, with staff always doing their best to ensure your stay is pleasant.

Our room is a two-story Premier Loft, with living room downstairs and bedroom upstairs. A luxurious corner-suite, it has floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides, surrounded by plants to make the 27-square-metre room feel bigger.

Upstairs, the bedroom reminds me of a cruise ship cabin — well designed to take utmost advantage of the space, including cubby holes for a book and charging a phone, and a flat-screen TV recessed into the wall. Downstairs we have another in-wall TV, as well as a couch that can pull out into a bed if needed. The living room space also has a small bar area with mini-fridge and facilities for making tea and instant coffee. The well-lit bathroom has a glass-doored shower (both rain and handheld). Luxe amenities are by Appelles Apothecary & Lab, each different with its own delicious scent. I particularly liked the hair conditioner with comfrey, planifolia, Australian sandalwood and kakadu plum.

Crystal Club rooms at Park Hotel Farrer Park are the very best, and include access to the Crystal Club lounge. The lounge has an inviting indoor space and outdoor deck where you can relax with a coffee and pastry. In the evenings the lounge offers wine, a few cocktails, and several selections of hot and cold foods, both Asian and western.

Breakfast is served on the fifth floor in the Blue Jasmine restaurant. It includes a cook-to-order egg station and an extensive buffet of western, Asian and Indian dishes. Sit beside Park Hotel Farrer Park’s lovely pool with waterfalls, inside the restaurant or on a covered deck surrounded by a garden. Also on the fifth floor is a 24-hour gym with great city views. For lunch and dinner, the Blue Jasmine is a Halal-certified Thai restaurant offering a unique dining oasis in Singapore. Downstairs in the lobby guests can also have teas, coffees, sandwiches and pastries at The Coffee Belt.

Ideally located at the entrance to the Farrer Park subway (MRT) station, it’s easy to travel from the hotel to a business meeting or to see Singapore’s spectacular gardens and architecture. Medical tourists are steps away from the hospital.

In any big city, it’s nice to be in a hotel with some character. Singapore’s Hotel G is one of those hotels. It’s a little bit Paris and a little bit New York, right in central Singapore, a few blocks from the Bencoolen subway station.

Arriving, we initially weren’t sure if we had the right place. Hotel G doesn’t have a traditional ground floor lobby. Instead, guests enter through an area connected to a popular bar and restaurant. Up a few steps and then a short elevator ride, the lobby is on the second floor. Cool hats and vintage cameras are on display here and downstairs, giving a hint to Hotel G’s chic decor.

Those interested in food will be especially interested in a stay at Hotel G. Breakfast, at Ginett Restaurant & Wine Bar, is very much worth upgrading from the room-only rate. It includes eggs cooked to order and an extensive buffet of Asian and western dishes, including (my favourite) proper croissants and pain au chocolat. Service is exceptional. As an example, we noted that the soy milk (how nice to even have milk options!) needed replacing. A server instantly brought a perfect hand-drawn latte from the bar over, with no need for us to return to the espresso machine (which also made quality coffees).

Ginett is also the place to go for a glass of wine in the afternoon or evening, and for lunch and dinner too. The restaurant has a wine selection that you’d expect in North America or Europe rather than Asia and, even more unusually, an extensive cheese and charcuterie selection too. Sit in the bar, or, if you need to get a little work done, in an area next to the bar with your glass of wine and your laptop (yes, with power outlets and wifi provided). Next door and also part of the hotel is another dining choice, 25 Degrees Burger & Liquor Bar, with sister outlets that are very popular in Los Angeles and Bangkok.

Hotel G has 308 rooms of four types, all city-sized but designed to make the most of the space. Good Rooms are 13 to 15 square meters, Great Rooms are 16 to 18 square meters, and Greater Rooms are 27 square meters. The Family Rooms consist of two interconnected Good Rooms. The chic decor is minimalist — padded leather headboards against walls papered to look like cement, with a feathered chandelier overhead. There’s room to work at the desk and even plenty of space for some morning yoga stretches on the laminate wood floor.

The compact bathrooms have an overhead and handheld shower, separated from the toilet by a curtain. The sink is in the main part of the bedroom. Bath amenities are by the Australian brand METIS. There’s a small area for hanging clothes, and space under the bed to slide a suitcase next to the safe drawer.

Though the hotel is popular for staycation weekends as well as for international travellers, those without a local SIM card will appreciate borrowing the smartphone provided in-room to help them find their way while exploring Singapore’s highlights.

Hotel G also has a well-equipped fitness centre, decorated in chic vintage style like the rest of the hotel. Each floor has a hot and cold water dispenser too. Singapore’s tap water is potable, but it’s nice to be able to refill a bottle with cold water and avoid adding more plastic to the planet.

 
We might be in one of my favourite cities in the world but I don’t want to go out. I don’t even want to leave my chair. I want to stay right here in the circular Club lounge of the Pan Pacific hotel and look at the spectacular view of Singapore. Perched at the top of the hotel, the lounge gives a 360 degree view of the surrounding area: to Marina Bay Sands in one direction, the Singapore Flyer in the other. Or out to the South China Sea with the countless ships at anchorage, patiently waiting their turn to deliver their cargo to the small city state.

As it turned out, I spent quite a bit of time in the Club lounge. Champagne breakfast was served there and we choose that over the extensive array of Indian, Western, South East Asian and Japanese offerings in the Edge restaurant downstairs. There was also afternoon tea and evening drinks and canapés for an excuse to take in the view as night fell. The food was plentiful and very good and the staff were helpful and friendly.

Pan Pacific underwent a complete refurbishment in 2012 and it shows. We were sleeping in a luxurious one bedroom Skyline suite complete with floor to ceiling windows and another fantastic city view. Great to relax in, the suite was also a good place to work with an ergonomic desk chair and complimentary wifi. If you choose to chill out in the room for a while there’s a wide range of entertainment options with the internet protocol TV, cable, and DVD player with a Bose surround sound system.

For more active entertainment the hotel has a 25m pool, suitable for just splashing around in or for getting some exercise. It also has a superb, spacious and well equipped gym, one of the best I’ve seen in any hotel.

It was Steve’s birthday while we were at the hotel and the guest services rep was perfectly discreet when enquiring when he should send up the surprise birthday cake. Champagne was becoming a bit of a theme of our visit and it was a surprise for me too when the cake arrived with a bottle of champagne – not sparkling wine, champagne.

With a prime location in the heart of Marina Bay, the hotel is well served by public transport, runs its own shuttles around the business district and is connected via a bridge to Suntec. All in all, it’s an ideal hotel for relaxing, exploring, shopping or doing business in Singapore.

 
A typically tropical downpour in Singapore; a gallant staff member stepping forth with a huge umbrella before we get out of the taxi to ensure we reach the hotel without a drop of rain touching us. What a good start to our stay!

Naumi hotel is a 73 room boutique property lurking just behind the Raffles hotel complex. It’s stylish and smart and the staff are sharp in dress and even sharper in service. After our courteous welcome we were led to our room and given a quick tutorial on how everything worked – and this was one room that really needed instruction. The ingenious use of space in the compact rooms means the tea/coffee making facilities are cleverly hidden away in a slide out panel and the ironing board is concealed under the bed. The shower cubicle has ‘magic glass’ which at the touch of a button turns opaque. The staff member told us the button to control this was put high to stop children playing with it. Unfortunately for the hotel, it was within easy reach for us and provided childlike fun during our stay.

The room is high tech haven where you can mirror what’s on your Macbook onto the Apple TV or play Xbox 360 or Nintendo. If physical activity is more your thing the hotel has two tiny workout rooms. They may be the smallest workout rooms we’ve seen but we still managed to work up a sweat and build an appetite for the unique breakfast on offer in the lobby restaurant.

Champagne at breakfast may not be all that unusual but protein drinks, vitamin pills and aloe vera juice certainly are; we felt virtuous as we popped the pills before sipping our champagne. The breakfast buffet was small but we loved it and the healthy options it offered.

The most wonderful thing about Naumi is the swimming pool. Oh what a pool! A rooftop infinity pool with views of the Singapore cityscape. We spent a relaxing few hours there after dark, when the poolside becomes a bar. Lounging, sipping and taking in the views was the perfect end to a day in sultry Singapore.