Another year has almost gone by. I haven’t been blogging as much as I once did, and that’s been because of a number of reasons: the lack of real travel opportunities has been the most obvious one, but that’s been in a way countered by the fact that my acquisition of technology gadgets hasn’t only slightly abated over these two pandemic years! But the other reasons have included a desire of late to also guard my digital footprint a little more carefully, and also that writing a meaningful post does take a bit of time that I’ve recently found harder to muster together.
That aside, I’ve resolved to write a few posts to wrap up a fairly sedate 2021. Starting off with our fifth staycation this year: I’ve blogged about the first three already but not the fourth yet as it was at the One Farrer Hotel, a property that I’d previously written about here a few years back.
With the gradual easing of travel restrictions towards the end of 2021, we’ve seen a number of friends bring their families for holidays out of the country. Not without risks and additional health measures that one would have to abide by in order to travel. Coupled also with the subtle messaging here that you are free to travel, but you do so at your own risks and will bear the costs incurred if you bring home the virus, we decided to postpone overseas holidays for 2021 and opted for a four day staycation in mid-December. The property we stayed at this time was the Oakwood Premier AMTD, and here are my comments of our stay.
The property is located in the central business district – my old work grounds for 7 years in the mid 1990s. We’d previously stayed at another property just down the road from Oakwood Premier AMTD – the M Hotel, and also blogged here – so I was still pretty familiar with the area. Oakwood Premier AMTD is actually a service apartment that sits amidst other equally tall buildings office buildings, so there’s a sense of being in a modern and busy part of Singapore.
The apartment block is also part of a small shopping mall that comprises retail shops and a few dining places too. There’s a small 7-11 for urgent toiletries and items in case you forget to bring them, and also a Ya Kun Kaya Toast outlet. The latter closes fairly early at the mid-afternoon, so if you need your toast and kopi fix, don’t go too late! Lau Pa Sat was an easy 7 minute walk from the block, so there’s certainly no lack of great dinner options.
Interestingly, the formal room booking package did not include overnight parking, so it was supposedly chargeable. However, at check-in, the hotel readily provided us a complimentary parking coupon for single-exit, and we got one coupon for each evening we stayed. This seemed to be something that was readily provided, so I wondered why the booking package simply didn’t make it a standard option. Perhaps the complimentary parking coupon was only given to certain classes of rooms? In any case, the shared carpark with the mall is rather small: I judge it to perhaps 60-70 lots, but we thankfully were able to find free lots each time we returned from the day’s outing.
We were in a lovely two bedroom apartment, that our boy quickly concluded was “much nicer than our Minton apartment”. The master room has its ensuite bathroom and a small walk-in wardrobe, and there is another common bathroom that is adjacent to the other bedroom. Both bathrooms are similarly equipped, with standing shower stalls that are equipped with a rainshower head, glass doors in the stall to prevent water from splashing to the rest of the toilet.
The general furnishing of our apartment was modern and typical of modern condo residential units, with a mix of parquet flooring, blinds, marble counter-tops, a fully equipped kitchen (though a microwave oven was oddly absent), fridge, washing sink, separate washer and dryer machines, a dining table, and a small living room with sofas. There were three large screen TVs – my guess of about 55″ size – that featured the a wide range of cable TV channels but not Internet TV services like Netflix. It looked possible to hook up a separate player to these TVs though, so if you need your Netflix or Disney+ binge while on vacation, you should be able to connect your mobile devices via HDMI cables to these TVs and binge away.
There are no safe deposit boxes in the apartment, but there are key-locked drawers in our master room at least. These drawers are large enough for laptops and cameras, so you can place them there when you’re out of the apartment, and lock them up.
Our apartment faced Tanjong Pagar Terminal, and beyond that the Singapore Strait, and Sentosa island is visible. Pretty nice views from the bedrooms to wake-up to each morning. That said, one side of the master bedroom faces an office building that’s just opposite to Oakwood Premier AMTD. For privacy reasons, the room blinds on that side got drawn down for most of the stay. The other bedroom had no such issues, so our kids in that room got the better views during the stay.
Some comments about accessibility too. Our apartment was located on the 24th floor, but isn’t directly accessible from the ground floor lobby nor the carpark. Rather, you’d need to take the lift to level 7 – where the reception, restaurant and swimming pool are located – and from there, take another lift to our apartment level. The second lift is key card access-only, which is pretty par for the course these days in hotels. It would had been nice for a residents’ only lift to be accessible from the ground and car park floors, but we got used to having to change lifts.
We didn’t avail ourselves too much to the property’s amenities during our stay: but we did check out the level 7 infinity pool. Like the other properties we’ve stayed at this year, access to these amenities has to be booked beforehand, which we did so using a convenient mobile app. Slots were not often available though for the pool, so it’s fastest fingers first! The pool was lovely, even if the view is only that of other office blocks and Tanjong Pagar Terminal haha. But the length of the pool is at least conducive to lap swimmers, and that bookings need to be made to access the pool also restricted the number of guests at any time. But there were the usual guests doing their various vanity poses for their Instagrams in the infinity pool, so do be mindful not to collide into them when you swim your laps.
In summary, all four of us really enjoyed our stay at Oakwood Premier AMTD. The two bedroom apartment was large, comfortable, modern fittings, and clean. This property gets us an easy recommendation for families looking for a staycation place!
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