Just completed a pretty decent 6 night stay at the GH. Was offered an upgrade to an inward-facing deluxe room at check-in, but declined. This is the 500sqft-ish junior suite-ish room type that’s been fairly recently remodeled. Ended up in a river-facing room on a high floor. Due to the curvature of the building, some of these are short and wide (better IMO), others long and narrow — that’s what I had this time, and it’s hard to get to the bed without bumping into the office chair at the work desk. Hallway had the usual GH FUK smell, room was mostly fine, except one night a strong smoke smell from an adjacent room seeped in. I had fresh fruit and little snacks delivered to the room daily.
The lounge has perhaps the strongest champagne selection I ever encountered at a hotel. A 4-night rotation of Chandon (Australia), Moët, Nicolas Feuillatte, and Roederer. I don’t think I noticed this on prior stays (although they always had proper champagne on Saturday night), so maybe it was due to the sumo tournament (and the crazy high rates it brought). The happy hour food has always been a little strange, with sandwiches/soup/salads/sushi/unappealing hot items. Certainly doesn’t match the quality of the champagne, but I guess still a pretty strong lounge food offering by Japanese standards. Desserts and fruit are outstanding.
Breakfast at the lounge is pretty weak and quite frankly not worth getting up for. Terrible (usually cold) scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon, and a quiche, some picked over fruit and cold cuts, and salads/Japanese items. I met up with a FTer who had breakfast included in his rate and invited me to the restaurant one morning; rather shockingly, the weak lounge breakfast is a pretty good representation of the restaurant breakfast.
As was the case in prior stays, nobody at the lounge talked to me or made an effort to refill my glass. I guess they’re more comfortable with Japanese guests. I sort of started wondering whether the handful of western guests present were actually staying at the hotel, or had just figured out that they can just sneak in and polish off the champagne.
Rates where eye watering due to the sumo tournament, but I had made a reservation under old cash and points. Certainly a good deal, 6k points and 8k yen (vs cash rates of 35k yen). No way I’d pay anywhere near that much, and I’m also not sure that the current rate of 15k points is justified except for a handful of high demand dates.