Nobby

I stayed in the St Regis Singapore for about 2.5 months earlier this year, so I got a very good sense of the place. I really loved it!

The rooms are excellent -- big room, very comfortable bed, huge fantastic bathroom. I loved the showers, with the 3 mini-heads hitting your chest. And the TV in the bathroom that you can watch from the tub or the toilet is very nice too. I really prefer the "long" rooms, on the back side of the hotel, over the "wide" rooms on the front side. They feel much more spacious to me, and the desk faces into the room, not to the wall. Though others liked the L-shaped couch and forest view of the "wide" rooms.

The biggest thing for me was the service, particularly the style of it. It was less subservient, more "friend-like". Part of this may be because I stayed for such an extended period. But colleagues who came through briefly also commented on this. It was great being greeted by the excellent doormen every night as I arrived back... the interaction felt more like friends greeting you, and helped to get some of that "coming home" feeling that you miss when on business travel. Everyone in the hotel greeted me by name everywhere I went, and seemed genuinely interested in how I was doing, how my day went, etc. When going through the lobby the manager on duty would often ask about how my stay is going, and actively solicited feedback about how to improve things at the hotel. When a butler would bring breakfast or coffee on a weekend morning, s/he would ask about what I was planning to do that day, and have recommendations about their favourite spot on the beach on Sentosa, their favourite restaurant or bar, some interesting event happening, etc. During the course of the 2.5 months I had a few occasions to make unusual requests of the butlers, and they were always very happy to help, and seemed to enjoy the chance to do something a bit different (from setting up a rose-petal bath and wine, to finding a pair of nail clippers)

The facilities are also great. The indoor airconditioned tennis court was a great way to work off stress and get a bit of exercise (though it was far too echo-y). The spa/sauna is very very nice as well, though I would have used it far more often if it was open later (closes at 10pm).

There were some teething problems at the beginning as they were getting the hang of things, primarily around being late or missing my morning coffee a few times. But that quickly went away, and coffee was always brought on time to the minute, to the point where I used it as my morning alarm. Once they started activating the bathroom TVs, they had an issue where sometimes they would come on in the middle of the night, though my understanding is that this has been fixed now. Other such issues like that have probably been resolved by now, and if not will be soon. It's the normal stuff associated with a brand-new hotel where the staff are just getting used to things.

My positive experience wasn't just because I was spending a couple months straight there. Several of my colleagues have also stayed at the St Regis, and they all rave about it -- and they are very, very frequent business travellers, who have seen it all.

One TripAdvisor review recommended that people go to the Fullerton instead, which made me chuckle. The Fullerton has a beautiful exterior and lobby, but the rooms really suck. If you're in the cheapest room, it resembles a Holiday Inn, and you don't even have an exterior window, just a window into the lobby! And that's if you can get one of the cheap rooms... they must only have like 10 of them, because they're constantly sold out and you're told you have to upgrade to a more expensive room. I stayed in one of their very pricey Esplanade rooms once as a result, and it did have a nice big wall of exterior windows, and the room was much bigger, but at its core it still wasn't anything special. Oh, and I was paying significantly more than a colleague on the "club" level, but he got access to the lounge and I didn't. When I pointed out to management the ridiculousness of the fact that I was paying more but getting less, they pretty much said tough luck.

So I would heartily recommend the St Regis Singapore... though it's really spoiled me. I was in the Le Meridien Shanghai recently, which is a great hotel in anyone's book, but I kept thinking about the various ways it was inferior to the St Regis Singapore