Hotel Ibis Singapore Review – The $1 Room

Yup, I’ve checked in. The deal at paywhatyouwant.com.sg is for real of course. It’s a spanking new hotel, so new that not everything is quite ready yet. It’s clean, neat, and modern. There’s nothing grand about it. It’s exactly what you’d expect of any reasonably good tourist class hotel, exactly the market that Hotel Ibis is targeting. The room may be slightly small, but it’s certainly bigger than what you’d find in other crammed inner-city hotels like, say, in Shinjuku Tokyo.

The room facilities are simple and basic. There’s free wireless WiFi, that’s a good thing. The mini fridge is really tiny. It fits just about three Coke cans. There’s minimal shelve space. I guess a budget traveler isn’t going to need lots of it anyway. Flooring is laminate, nothing classy (the corridors outside the room are carpeted). There’s cable TV.

I noticed that the room door doesn’t have a peep hole. It seems rather unusual, since one would expect these simple security features, and it’s not like this is something uncommon or expensive. Even budget travelers need security. The other thing missing is a clock. Not a big deal, I know, I can just look at my watch or handphone for the time. Maybe, like the peephole, the clock isn’t installed yet.

The hotel is so spanking new that it’s not quite complete yet. I kind of expected that, actually. They were still setting up various fixtures in the restaurants. The floor I am on seems all setup, nothing unfinished that I can see. But I can hear hammering sounds from my room as I’m writing this. It’s day time, so that’s okay.

They serve $15 international buffet breakfast. Lunch and Dinner is from $15 upward, depending on what you order from the Tapas menu. There’s plenty of food around the hotel too.

Sim Lim Square is just a stone’s throw away. It’s really convenient. There’s perhaps a bit more walking to get to the MRT. But hey, the location is good enough in general. It’s a hotel I would stay at. Price is another matter of course. The current promotional rate at $138 is, in my opinion, as much as I would tolerate if I were a tourist dependent on the MRT. It’s at least a 15 mins of brisk walking away. That’s not a distance I would mind myself when I’m travelling overseas, except that the places I go to overseas are not as hot and humid like Singapore is. An alternative is to take the cab, which are relatively cheap in Singapore and plentiful outside the hotel.

Take a look at the room photos below. I imagine this is about the first real photos of the actual hotel. Everything on the hotel website right now is an artist’s impression. (Ok my colleague got to stay yesterday, so he got his photos up first.) I’ve got another update here.