Booked a luxury room for my anniversary and was given an upgrade to club rooms, the views of the rooms were perfect, unfortunately my request for a south view room was not available, it's still ok for me since the service is just great, all the staff are very professional.
The bed is just stunning, in all the hotels I've stayed I prefer Sofitel beds, it just has the right softness for me and my wife, by the way the cribs was good too, maybe I'll let my baby girl write a review about the crib, haha.
Anyway the service at this hotel wins it all, thumbs up for all the staff that attended me during my stay, I'll keep staying at Sofitel for my next anniversary.

We stayed at the Sofitel because of the great reviews on this forums. Our feelings were mixed at best after the night.....

Room 1008 (corner room, upgraded with extra HKD 200)
Day: Dec 23-24

1. Hotel Decor - nice but it didn't really sparkle until at night when the chandelier in the lobby lit up the whole place. Because the ceiling was very high , during the day when there was just sunlight, the lobby felt cold and unwelcoming, and had a distinctly :mainland chinese" feel to it ( hard for us to describe but we have ventured around China enough to feel it) - a bit stark if I may say . The lobby could do with a bit more colour to liven it up during the day time.

2. Room Decor

The corner room was a bad idea - altho a bit roomier than the standard rooms, we had a vast expanse of glass wall which gave us only a view of the building /windows next door at close range. It would have been quite nice if the view offered something else, but we had to bring the urtains down ll the time to avoid us being in public display. SO whether we had the corner suite or not, didn't really matter cos we saw nothing other than curtains !!!

The bathroom was very nice - had a separate bah tub, and a separated area for shower and toilet, and again would have been a special touch if not for the glass and proximity to the building next door.

Also, when the weather is cold and there is no heating, the corner rooms are very cold and we could feel the chill seeping through the curtains and the glass - we spent most of the time in our rooms full clothed in our jackets or huddling i bed under the blanets.

3. Service - it was nice but there were a few slips:-

we asked for extra blanket and duvet, both arrived without a cover on it. We then found a cover which was included in the pile separately, which meant we had to slip the duvet into the cover ourselves. We asked for an extra pillow and the same thing happened - it came without a pillow case. Not quite sure whether we were supposed to just sleep on the pillow without the cover ???????

We asked for the temperature to be turned up in our room , nothing happened after calling service centre and after 20 minutes we called again. An engineer came up and fiddled with something,and tried to get the controls to go up from 19C in the room but after some hulabaloo it didn't seem to work. And THEN we were told of the simple reason why our temp control didn't work - there was no heating provided in the hotel ( something falling under govt policy). GZ was registering temperatures of around 7C that day !!!

The room only had chinese tea. I called service centre for an English tea bag and they said they only offer chinese tea, period. I could not believe that the entire Sofitel does not have an English teabag on its premises, which cost next to nothing anyway. I also couldn't believe that they would begrudge a guest 1 tea bag !!

The tea press they had in the room was old and a bit rusty - the wire meshing at the bottom of the compressor was worn and tirn and I snagged my finger while trying to wash it - sorry to be pedantic on fine detail but I find that a simple soluion of a ceramic teapot would have been an easy solution.

Saving Grace - a staff asked us about our visit and when we told him about the cold and the housekeeping service he was apologetic - at least they cared enough to ask

4. Location - middle of nowhere !! its a 10 min taxi rider to the nearest malls, and nearby there wa really not much to see. I guess if the weather was not that cold we could have walked around the corner and there are some restaurants and small shops along the road. We were quite far away from the sighseeing areas like Li Wan area.

What I liked

- The spa ( great ambience) and the swimming pool area.Not a fan of L'occitance products so didn't ltry the treatments.
- The room service menu was very well and reasonably priced, and the food quality was good. We ordered a magherita pizza which arrived piping hot and the portions were generous.


Verdict - woudl I go back again? Proably, but only if I need to be in that area.