The Travel Critic

The first thing you want to know, always, is whether it’s any good. So here it is, up front, no foreplay: yes. It’s very good. Properly good. Luxurious, clean, stylish, and, annoyingly for everywhere else, brilliantly located.

But, my word, the courtship.

Because the Hopewell does not so much present itself as dare you to find it. You arrive in Wan Chai expecting, if not quite squalor, then at least a sort of faded, slightly apologetic mid market anonymity. The branding has all the confidence of a Travelodge that’s been through a divorce. You enter via a shopping centre, never a promising sign, and begin to suspect you’ve made one of those catastrophic booking errors that will later require wine and denial.

And then the lifts begin.

There are, I think, seventeen of them. Possibly more. They go in different directions, at different speeds, governed by a system that appears to have been designed by a committee of Bond villains. You tap, you wait, you ascend, you change lifts, you question your life choices. By the time you reach reception you feel you’ve passed some sort of urban initiation ritual. Frankly, if they handed you a robe and a dagger at the desk, you’d accept without question.

But then, ah.

Space. Calm. Polished stone. Staff who look like they’ve never been flustered in their lives. And suddenly the whole thing snaps into focus: this isn’t a confused hotel; it’s a hotel that simply refuses to explain itself too early.

The rooms are the real reveal. Big, properly big, not “Hong Kong big,” which usually means you can open either your suitcase or the door, but not both. Stylish without that dreadful try hard minimalism that leaves you hunting for a light switch like a Victorian ghost. And the views, good grief, the views. Hong Kong Island laid out like a glossy magazine spread: the harbour glittering, the skyscrapers jostling for attention, the Peak looming with that smug, green superiority.

It feels, once you’re up there, less like a hotel and more like a sanctuary you’ve earned. Which, given the lift situation, you absolutely have.

So yes, it’s excellent. But it does itself no favours. This is a place that hides its light under several bushels, a mall, and a baffling vertical transport system. Arrive with low expectations and mild confusion, and you’ll leave wondering why on earth they don’t shout about it.

Or perhaps that’s the point. Not every hotel needs to seduce you at the door. Some prefer to make you work for it, and then reward you handsomely when you finally get there.