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Old Jan 8, 2019 | 12:05 am
  #102  
bgriff
All eyes on you!
20 Years on Site
 
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Chicago
Posts: 5,341
Not sure if there is a more current thread on this property but this seems to be one of the more active ones so thought I would share a few thoughts after a recent club stay.

First, worth remembering coming in that this is a Vegas-style mega-resort, so important to adjust your expectations vs typical Asia hotel at this price point. Lots of lines everywhere, crowded elevators (doubly so because of pool and roof restaurant traffic going up as well as usual traffic to/from ground floor), and necessarily impersonal service.

Nowhere was that more true than at the club. It was nothing like your typical hotel club lounge which can be a refuge from the world; instead this one is huge and packed to the gills—for Saturday evening service we had to wait 15 minutes for a table in a rather chaotic crowd/line. So maybe better to think of the club as “a restaurant just like any other in this big busy resort, but one where you happen to get free food at breakfast, afternoon tea, and cocktail hour.”

That said the club still wasn’t a bad value, because the priority check-in area it allows is worth something by itself, and for breakfast you get the choice of the club (which we didn’t even try) or three restaurants. We tried Spago, which is outdoors on the roof and thus demands a try, even if it seems to be typically the longest wait (unsurprisingly). Also tried Rise in the lobby which had a bigger selection of food with more nationality options between the basic western and limited dim sum / Chinese at Spago (Rise added Indian, Korean, Japanese, and others). At both the food was very good, maybe not to the very high standard of Asia’s top breakfast buffets, but well within the range of what you would expect for variety and quality.

Evening club lounge service is fine, besides the wait, which seemed likely to have been a weekend-only thing (and maybe even rarer than that); it includes basic drinks with mid-range liquors as well as serviceable wine options (champagne was Piper-Heidseck). Food wouldn’t be amazing as a meal replacement, but was fine for snacks to hold over until dinner.

The club room itself was also huge, one of the biggest standard hotel rooms I’ve stayed in, which probably puts it well above average in Singapore. I was also pleasantly surprised that my room was available when we arrived at the hotel around 9am. They only had a smoking room available but it was worth it to get into the room after a long flight, and there was no noticeable smell in the room — though the hallway on the smoking floor smelled like walking into a very old Vegas casino.

Overall i would probably stay here again. I went in thinking of it as a bucket list thing, but it really is just such an impressive building and operation, and has become such a major attraction in Singapore that I’d surely find myself at MBS once or twice on any leisure trip to Singapore anyway, and would be a shame to miss out on the pool and other perks of staying there. And it is expensive, but other hotels in Singapore aren’t cheap, so that’s somewhat relative, if you’d be paying cash for other options at least.
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