W Hong Kong

We hopped a quick flight from Taipei to Hong Kong with a flight time of just under two hours.  We flew coach on a Cathay Pacific A330 which was great for the short flight.  I sat in one section of three seats in the middle of Annie and Lizzy and Joe sat across the aisle from us.  The girls were really well behaved coloring, watching shows and eating the surprisingly decent in flight meal of beef curry with rice.  After we deplaned Joe waited for our luggage with Annie while I took Lizzy to figure out the cab situation, which was very easy.  Joe and Annie met us at the taxi stand and we took a ~40 minute ride to the W Hong Kong which is on the Kowloon side. The cab ride cost about US$40 and once again Lizzy slept for the entire ride. 

The cab dropped off right in front of the hotel and we were met by a bellman who took our luggage and pointed us towards the elevator bay.  Check in is on the 6th floor and the lobby was crowded on this busy holiday Friday afternoon.  We found the SPG Platinum desk and were welcomed by a nice woman who made some friendly small talk while she processed our reservation.  Check in seemed to take a long time and Annie was getting fairly antsy - later when I was reading reviews for the hotel I noticed that a lot of people complained of inefficient check in. At least we were using the SPG Platinum Desk - the regular line was super backed up. 

We were very excited to be upgraded into one of their "Fabulous Suites" and this is another reason why we are fairly loyal to our two main hotel brands.  This suite was going for just under $1,000 per night during the Golden week holiday weekend we were there, so it made our points redemption feel even better than originally planned.

We were then offered our Platinum amenity, which was either 500 Starpoints, a W Hong Kong baseball cap, or breakfast each morning for our stay.  In what was perhaps the easiest decision we have ever made, we took the breakfast.  We wondered if anyone in the history of the world has turned down a week's worth of expensive breakfasts in lieu of a baseball cap. 

Our room number was 3801, which was on the top floor for rooms.  The hotel also uses Floors 73 (gym) and 76 (pool) but the rooms stop at 38.  We were very happy with the amazing room they gave us and it really helped make the stay in Hong Kong a great one.

Entry hallway

Living room overlooking a working harbor

52" LCD TV, perhaps the largest hotel TV we have seen

Looking into the bedroom from the living area

VERY comfortable W bed, slept like babies every night

Shower, bath and TV: lots of cartoons watched in here

Bathroom

Desk with phone to call for Annie's self proclaimed favorite food, "Room Service"

Bath amenities, with nice things for the girls

The included breakfast buffet was amazing, almost on par with our experience at the W Singapore.  The restaurant was on the 6th floor next to the lobby and had a great spread all four mornings we ate there.  It had pretty views out to the working harbor and was surprisingly crowded throughout our stay.  To say I love breakfast buffets is an understatement. If we didn't have the girls I could probably sit there for a few hours enjoying myself - eating, drinking coffee, chatting, reading the paper and planning the day.  While meals out with young kids are by no means relaxing, I will say that it's definitely getting easier for us as the girls get a bit older.  

Lot and lots of watermelon each morning

Good bacon, which is a tough find in Tokyo

Pretty sure this was Joe's plate each morning - breakfast of champions

Breakfast dessert

We love buffet breakfasts

Interesting decor throughout the restaurant

Giant communal kitchen table - giving this restaurant its name, "The Kitchen"

Different gummies each morning

Love the cute little bottles of juice and milk

Cereal station

Fruit and fresh pancakes and waffles all the way to the left

A few of the hot selections - mini quiches and lobster eggs Benedict

We were amazed at how kid-friendly the W Hong Kong was despite its trendy appearance.  Both girls loved the kid-sized robes the hotel provided, even if they were still about 4 or 5 years from fitting property.  High chairs and plastic tableware was provided at breakfast, there was a yummy and reasonably priced kids' room service menu, and a hotel employee even came and placed rubber corner guards on all of the sharp edges of our furniture.

Some of the nicest features of the hotel were the pool and the gym. The pool was the highest pool we had ever been to, but lacked the amazing surroundings of the slightly lower Marina Bay Sands in Singapore.  And as remarkable (and high) as the pool was, it was hard to believe that just in front of it is the Ritz Carlton Hong Kong which also has a rooftop pool, but we couldn't even see the top most days because of the clouds.

Looking up at the Ritz Carlton, from our 76th floor pool.  That is a tall hotel!

Made lots of use of the hot tub because it was pretty cool with the wind

We used the fitness center a couple of nights and it had some great views which were very hard to photograph, especially with my iPhone.

Spa in the women's locker room

In addition to the impressive hotel amenities, the location was nice for us as it was co-located with a huge mall called Elements which had a subway station with a connection to Hong Kong Disneyland. The hotel also offered a complimentary shuttle to a number of key tourist locations nearby which was great because everything seemed to be under construction and it didn't seem like there was any way to walk with a stroller.

We would happily come back to the W if we find ourselves back in Hong Kong.  For a first time trip, we would highly recommend it to just about anyone.

Trip Planning: Taipei and Hong Kong

Joe has been traveling for work much more than he anticipated so far this year, so we thought trying to fit in a week trip would be a good way to ensure some family time!  Since we are still new to the Asia travel experience, it is pretty easy to find availability with our dwindling points balances to go somewhere we haven’t been yet.  We have been wanting to take the girls to Hong Kong Disneyland (which would leave just the two parks in Paris on the list, until Shanghai opens) and focused our efforts primarily around trying to find something in that part of Asia.

Like most things with Joe, travel planning can be really, really annoying, but this time he actually wasn’t too bad.  After our New Year’s trip to 6 cities requiring 7 flights, we agreed that next time we would take a much more simple vacation with one destination.  After some discussion, we thought we would try two places over eight days and see if that would be more reasonable.  Next was figuring out how to do as much as we could using our miles and hotel points.

As usual, our millions of Delta miles, while actually pretty useful for one traveler, are incredibly difficult/impossible to use when you need them for a family of four.  Joe has stopped flying Delta in large part due to how difficult it is to use the miles, but we still earn about 300,000 a year through various credit card related activities, but we may need to rethink putting any spend toward Delta miles.  Since we were considering Hong Kong, we turned to our Chase Ultimate Rewards points, which are a transfer partner of British Airways, which partners with Cathay Pacific.  We checked availability on the British Airways website, and to our surprise, found pretty good availability from Tokyo to Hong Kong despite being “Golden Week” at both locations.  After tinkering around further, we decided to add Taipei as the second destination since it is only a two hour flight from Hong Kong.

Our new philosophy with miles and points amid all the massive devaluations is to use them any chance we have, and occasionally splurge to try out some of the premium cabins we couldn’t otherwise afford.  We ended up booking the following itinerary using Chase Ultimate Rewards points transferred to British Airways Avios:

Tuesday, April 29            Tokyo Narita (NRT) to Taipei (TPE)

Friday, May 2                  TPE to Hong Kong (HKG)

Wednesday, May 7          HKG to NRT

For the first flight, I will fly with Annie in first class, while Joe and Lizzy will try business class on the upper deck of the Cathay 747-400, which won’t be around much longer as they start to retire those gas guzzlers.  Annie is already excited and Lizzy doesn’t know or care, so it seems like a fair way to distribute the seats.  The two tickets in First Class cost 60,000 Avios plus $97.14 in taxes and fees while the two Business Class tickets cost 40,000 Avios plus $97.14.  To be clear, this is by no means cheap or a great (even good) redemption for such a short flight, but we wanted to the chance to try out these cabins.

We will fly economy from TPE to HKG for the 1h 50min flight, and then all take business class back to Tokyo from HKG.  Ideally, we would have liked to have taken First Class from HKG in order to try out the lounge in Hong Kong, but availability wasn’t there on the days that made sense.  The four tickets in economy cost 18,000 Avios plus $148 in taxes and fees while the four Business Class tickets from HKG back to NRT cost 80,000 Avios plus $139.34.  Again, this was not a great deal by any stretch, but it isn't always possible to maximize miles!

Next up was the hotel planning.  As we have said before, with the hotel status we have at Starwood and Hyatt, we do try to book there because we feel we get good value from the perks offered.  We ended up picking the Grand Hyatt Taipei over the W Taiepi for our three nights there.  The first night was booked using our annual free night from having the Chase Hyatt credit card, which comes with a $75 annual fee.  We booked the second and third nights using free night certificates earned from the recent Hyatt promotion, where if you stayed five nights, you received one free night at any Hyatt category 1-4.  The all-in refundable cash rate for the days we were staying was $897 for the base room, so it was a solid use of the free nights.

We then looked to Hong Kong.  Without getting into the details of the loyalty programs, we usually look to Starwood for the longer stays at one location since we qualify for Starwood Platinum status by staying 50 nights a year whereas we qualify for Hyatt Diamond by making 25 stays (regardless of nights stayed).  We received a certificate (that expires July 31^st) from Starwood for requalifying for Platinum last year that gives you 35% off a points stay up to five nights.  Another great thing about the Starwood program is that when you stay five nights on points, the fifth night is free.  Since we were staying for five nights, we tried to make this work, and lucky for us, things lined up perfectly.  We booked five nights at the W Hong Kong.  With the fifth night free and 35% off, it was only 10,400 points per night.  The all-in refundable cash rate was $410/night, so while this wasn’t an amazing deal, it was good enough under the new philosophy of using the points whenever possible.

Next up is trying to figure out what would be fun to do in Taipei and Hong Kong, but that should be a lot easier than this portion!

Le Meridian Koh Samui

Joe was too cheap to get a 4^th night at the Conrad so we moved to the Le Meridian Koh Samui for our final night in Thailand.  We had Mr. Samui pick us up at 3pm and drive us about 30 minutes back towards the airport to the final hotel on our trip.  Unlike the Conrad, the Le Meridian was located in a busy part of town right off the main road.  We knew just about anything was going to be a bit of a letdown after the Conrad, but it was only for a night so it wasn’t that big of a deal.  We checked in before 4 and were greeted by a number of very friendly employees who really liked the girls and walked us to our room.  Annie let one of them carry her for some of the way which was a bit surprising.

We booked a standard room and used an upgrade certificate to move to a pool suite, which shared a pretty large pool with 5 other units.  The room itself was very small, probably the smallest room we had during the trip, and by the time we got two cribs in there it was jam packed.  But, it worked for us since we had a nice private patio overlooking the shared pool area.   Three of the other five units were occupied during our time there, and while it was a bit odd initially having an another couple 20 feet across the pool sitting on their patio or seeing them lounge in bed, it was not a problem at all.  It would have been really, really fun to have had friends and family rent out all the units around the pool area and have a private pool to hang around in.  And it would have been really, really weird to come here on your honeymoon. :)

Eating some M&Ms and enjoying some welcome drinks upon arrival at the Le Meridian

Entrance to Le Meridian located on this street... reminded me of the North Shore a bit

View from our villa. If you look closely, you can see our across the pool neighbors hanging out in bed

Annie and Joe enjoying the pool

Looking into our room - gives you an idea of how tiny it was! There was a bathroom to the right with a semi outdoor shower

Like all the other places in Thailand and Malaysia, the room service menu was very reasonable and pretty good. I have to say, Thai food comes in way ahead of Japanese food for me any day.  We went swimming a couple of times, had dinner on our patio and walked around the resort.  

The resort was very small compared to the Conrad and had a small beach that went away at high tide.  There was a long pier, maybe 100m, that had a bar in the middle that let you get a good view back to the hotel, but the water was a bit rough and it was tough get the girls on it.  There was a pool overlooking the beach with a restaurant and a bar and some grass areas further towards the street that had various activities throughout the day like Thai Boxing and Yoga.

Beach front pool and dining

Pier with bar in the middle

Standing at the end of the pier looking back at the resort

We came back to the room and got the girls ready for bed.  As was typically the case, the girls fell asleep quickly and we followed suit shortly after.  We had the breakfast buffet in the morning that was good but nothing remarkable - probably at the bottom of the list for me on this trip.  We decided to venture out by foot and see what was in the area around the hotel.  To immerse ourselves in the local culture, we stopped at a convenience store and got the girls an ice cream.  

Best Friends

A face only a father could love

Big sister stayed nice and clean

She swung by a Thai tattoo parlor on the way to ice cream

We headed further down the somewhat chaotic road and found a small strip mall-like shopping area that happened to have a small kids play place.  It was 30 or 40 bhat (around $1 USD) per child for a half hour and the girls stayed for close to an hour and it was probably one of their most fun moments of the entire trip.  Not that it was a surprise, but it again reminded us that they don’t really care where they are as long as they get to do exactly what they want to do. 

Authentic Thai play place

Looks like Eden

Big girl

While out walking, we noticed there were tons of tourists riding around on mopeds, most of them without helmets and some with kids on their bikes with them.  Joe and I kept commenting to one another that it seemed SO dangerous. When we later mentioned it to our driver on the way to the airport and he told us that tourists frequently have accidents, get injured and total the bikes.  Within minutes of this conversation we drove by a man that had wiped out on his moped and was waiting for help.  Hard to imagine taking risks like that on a vacation, especially now that we have kids!  In yet another odd coincidence, we saw a flatbed truck drive by with a bunch of tourists sitting on makeshift benches in the back.  Joe asked me, "Can you IMAGINE anything more dangerous??" Before I could even answer, we came up behind a beat up SUV with people riding ON THE ROOF. 

We headed back to the hotel, did the typical swim and food at the room and finished packing up for the trip home while the girls took a nap. I headed back out to the main road to get a quick (and insanely cheap) manicure at the spa next door.  We checked out and Mr. Samui met us for our final transfer and we were to the airport in less than 30 minutes.  As mentioned before, the Koh Samui airport is really interesting and entirely outdoors.  It has a really neat shopping street between the drop off and the terminal.  We were flying coach, got settled into our seats and had a short flight to Bangkok where we had a 5 or 6 hour layover before our red eye flight back to Tokyo.

Massage "beds" at the spa next to Le Meridian

Exhausted at the end of a looong vacation. Love these sweet girls and this pic!!