Tag Archives: Park Hyatt

Keeping it Short and Suite at the Park Hyatt Tokyo

25 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by in Accommodations, Asia, Hyatt, Japan, Tokyo

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Mrs. Selfish and I stayed at the Park Hyatt Tokyo twice before – once during the Selfish Year trip, and a second time during our trip to the Maldives. It’s one of our favorite hotels in the world, and one I was looking forward to sharing it with Baby Selfish.

During our first two stays, we had temporary diamond status (back when Hyatt was overly generous with their diamond trial), which meant we had free room service breakfast, access to the sauna, and free admission to the NYC bar during the diamond happy hour. Amazing benefits, to be sure, and ones which we were not going to get this time around as lowly Platinum members.

Upgrading to the Suite & Guest of Honor status

Since I still had a diamond suite certificate to burn, I booked the three of us into a king suite for two nights on a severely reduced paid stay using a combination of the Best Rate Guaranteed 20% discount and buying Hyatt gift certificates at 15% off.

In the end, we ended up paying something like 55% of the rack rate for the room and were upgraded to a suite. Pretty great.

Since we wanted to spend a total of 4 nights at the PHT so Mrs. Selfish’s parents could recover from jetlag, I booked the remaining two nights in a standard king, transferring points over to Cousin Selfish’s account so we could try out the Guest of Honor status.

If you’ve never tried Guest of Honor status you basically get to partake in a diamond member’s benefits if they book the room for you with points. Hyatt’s transfer policy is fairly generous, though a member can only receive points from another member once every 30 days, so make sure to transfer all your points at once!

I was secretly hoping that the Park Hyatt Tokyo would give us the best of both worlds and keep us in the suite for 4 nights while giving us diamond status, but didn’t have high hopes since this IS Japan after all. As expected, they followed the rules down to the letter.

Baby Selfish enjoying the view.

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4 Nights is Not Enough at the Park Hyatt Busan

08 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by in Accommodations, Asia, Busan, Hyatt, South Korea

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This is post eight of twelve on our autumn trip to South Korea. Check out the other posts in this series here:

Mrs. Selfish and I have stayed at a lot of Park Hyatt hotels since we discovered the world of miles and points. The Park Hyatts Zurich, Istanbul, Tokyo (twice), Sydney, and most recently Seoul, come to mind.

And while this is by no means an exhaustive list of Park Hyatt’s (there are currently 35, according to my count on Hyatt’s webpage), I can easily say that our stay at the Park Hyatt Busan was the best stay I’ve ever had at a Park Hyatt hotel.

Good view? Check. Good breakfast? Check. Good service? Check. Good room? Double-check! We basically had the perfect stay here, but it took a lot of coordination on the hotel’s side.

tl;dr: stay here if you’re in Busan. It’s #$(*&#$ awesome!

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4 Nights at the Stylish Park Hyatt Seoul

02 Tuesday Dec 2014

Posted by in Accommodations, Asia, Hyatt, Seoul, South Korea

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This is post two of twelve on our autumn trip to South Korea. Check out the other posts in this series here:

For our first stop in South Korea, Mrs. Selfish and I decided to head back to Seoul. Seoul is an easy city to get to from the States and is the hub for Korean Air, which has direct flights from several cities including San Francisco.

Seoul was also an ideal place to recover from our 16 hours of jetlag, since we already had an idea of where to go, what to do, and what to eat. To make things even less stressful, I booked us for 4 nights in the stylish Park Hyatt Seoul, set in the heart of Gangnam.

Yep, Gangnam style reference – except! – you can actually see the top of the Park Hyatt Seoul in the bottom right corner of this shot. It’s that close. Unfortunately, no Psy sightings this time around.

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4 Nights at the Magnificent Park Hyatt Istanbul

13 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by in Accommodations, Europe, Hyatt

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This is the second of eleven posts on Istanbul. Check out our other posts here:

After a grueling 2 connections and 20 hours of flying, Mrs. Selfish and I finally arrived in Istanbul. A good 10 hours ahead of our home time zone, Mrs. Selfish and I were pretty beat, but there were places to go, things to see, food to eat.

Having recently attained diamond status through the Hyatt Diamond challenge, I was pretty excited to check out the Park Hyatt Istanbul. Mrs. Selfish and I have stayed at the Park Hyatt Zurich, Sydney, and Tokyo (where we pumped iron with Arnold Schwarzenegger), so I was looking forward to seeing whether or not the Park Hyatt Istanbul lives up to those other fabulous hotels.

Park Hyatt Istanbul 003

Short  answer: it does.

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Pumping Iron at the Park Hyatt Tokyo

23 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by in Accommodations, Asia, Hyatt, Japan, Tokyo

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Mrs. Selfish and I were originally planning on skipping Tokyo altogether, having gone there twice before. Unfortunately, I had some difficulty finding a business award flight from Tokyo to San Francisco. Availability was limited at the time I booked our tickets, so I opted to book economy, with the hopes that 2 business class awards would open up closer to our travel date.

After checking back every day for two months, I finally found 2 business class awards. Unfortunately, they were 4 days after our connecting flight from Okinawa. Fortunately, we love Tokyo.

Having had a wonderful 5 night stay at the Park Hyatt Tokyo last May, I decided to book 3 nights at the Park Hyatt Tokyo. While I wasn’t surprised that the hotel was still amazing, I was surprised by who I ran into at the Park Hyatt’s gym – let me set the scene.

The Park Hyatt’s gym is small, especially the weight section, which can’t fit more than 6-8 people comfortably. Just check this puppy out:

tokyo-park-hyatt-022

So it didn’t take me very long to realize that the hulking man doing bicep curls to my left was none other than the Governator himself, Mr. Arnold Schwarzenegger. After a few awkward glances, I fell into my normal routine until the man left, without saying a word to him. After I told Mrs. Selfish what happened, she told me to wake up her up the following morning, should Arnold be at the gym a second time.

The second morning I woke up and bam!, there he was again. After a quick phone call, Mrs. Selfish arrived with camera in tow, so that we would have photographic evidence of our encounter with Mr. Schwarzenegger.

Behold!

Park Hyatt Tokyo 001

Mr. Schwarzenegger was in town promoting his new movie, Escape Plan, and was a guest at the Park Hyatt Tokyo. Though he seemed like he had a packed day, he still took the time to pose for a picture with us, which was pretty cool. Though I never saw him outside of the gym itself, I did see his Japanese bodyguard on several more occasions.

Anyway, back to the hotel itself.

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