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Hotel Port 7 – Substance is hard to achieve
Read full review: Hotel Port 7 – Substance is hard to achieveI didn’t stay at Hotel Port 7. I can’t tell you whether the pillows are plump, the showers powerful, or whether the housekeeping folds the loo paper into little triangles that make people feel they’ve entered a higher social class. What I can tell you is that I stopped for a drink on the terrace,…
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Amoodi – The Best Thing on the Beach Isn’t the View
Read full review: Amoodi – The Best Thing on the Beach Isn’t the ViewWe’ve all been there. You trek down a glorious stretch of coastline, lured by turquoise water and the promise of a lazy afternoon, only to find the same tired formula waiting at the end of it. A beach shack at the back. Sunbeds at the front priced somewhere between “luxury experience” and “small family hatchback”.…
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Moxy Barcelona Gets the Modern Hotel Just Right
Read full review: Moxy Barcelona Gets the Modern Hotel Just RightI’m starting to develop a worrying affection for the Moxy brand. Worrying because, on paper, it ought to annoy me. It’s a hotel concept apparently devised by a committee of people who own trainers costing more than my first car. There’s the inevitable industrial-chic aesthetic, the communal tables, the mood lighting, the sense that someone…
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Pez Vela – The Restaurant That Attracts Exactly the Right Sort of Crowd
Read full review: Pez Vela – The Restaurant That Attracts Exactly the Right Sort of CrowdYou can tell a great restaurant by the people who choose to spend their time there. A beach bar in Barcelona ought, by rights, to be a chaotic affair: sunburnt tourists comparing maps, influencers photographing cocktails from seventeen angles, and stag parties negotiating with the laws of gravity. Yet Pez Vela somehow escapes all that.…
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Not all seats are equal. Especially on Etihad.
Read full review: Not all seats are equal. Especially on Etihad.The thing about first-world problems is that the moment you complain about anything remotely luxurious, somebody lobs the phrase “first-world problems” at your head as if they’ve delivered the final word in moral philosophy. Bad service at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Mayfair? First-world problems. Your Aston Martin has ludicrously expensive parts? First-world problems. The caviar…
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Man Wah – Silk Slippers Above the Harbour
Read full review: Man Wah – Silk Slippers Above the HarbourHong Kong, after Shenzhen, feels like stepping out of a spaceship and into a well cut Savile Row suit. Not because it’s old, though parts of it gloriously are, but because it understands something Shenzhen hasn’t yet learned: that progress without polish is just noise. Shenzhen dazzles you with drone delivered toothbrushes and toilets that…
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The Hopewell Hotel: A Five-Star Stay Hidden Behind a Shopping Centre and a Lift-Based IQ Test
Read full review: The Hopewell Hotel: A Five-Star Stay Hidden Behind a Shopping Centre and a Lift-Based IQ TestThe 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…
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Sky High and Slightly Smug in Shenzhen
Read full review: Sky High and Slightly Smug in ShenzhenSome hotels trade on geography like it’s a personality trait. White sand beaches so soft you feel guilty walking on them. Alpine perches where you’re served fondue while staring into the moral abyss of a glacier. And then there’s this place, which has decided correctly that the most dramatic natural wonder of the modern world…
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A Modern Grand Hotel That Knows Its Manners
Read full review: A Modern Grand Hotel That Knows Its MannersIf modern luxury hotels were people, most would be that over eager chap at a party who insists on telling you about his watch collection before you have even found the bar. The Shangri La Qiantan, however, is something rarer: a place with enough confidence to pour you a drink first, then quietly reveal it…
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Intercontinental Shenzhen: Calm, Coffee and Clever Toilets in Shenzhen
Read full review: Intercontinental Shenzhen: Calm, Coffee and Clever Toilets in ShenzhenBig international chains, when done properly, are not soulless monoliths but something closer to a warm bath drawn at precisely the right temperature. You arrive frazzled, over-stimulated, slightly cross with the world after another immigration queue that seems to have been designed by a sadist, and there it is: beige, marbled, quietly humming with competence.…
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Fabulous food, stunning stays, honestly reviewed.
Paul Southgate is The Travel Critic—the kind of traveller who claims to love adventure, as long as it includes 24-hour room service and a spa.
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About the Author
Paul Southgate: a patchwork of Hughs stitched together with fraying thread. The poor man’s Hugh Grant, all charm on a budget. The thinking woman’s Hugh Laurie, though thinking too hard might ruin the illusion. He’s got Hugh Jackman’s kindness, but not the abs, and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s enthusiasm for food, minus the ability to turn nettles into Michelin-starred soup. A wannabe Hugh Hefner—pipe dreams in a velvet dressing gown—but in reality, closer to Hugh Bonneville, bumbling through life with a comforting sort of dignity. A man of many Hughs, and yet…none of them.
