Howard Plaza Hotel Kaohsiung — Hotel in Kaohsiung

For our 40th wedding anniversary my wife and I enjoyed an 18 day Asian smorgasbord tour from 28 December 2019 to 14 January 2020 visiting in order Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Laos and Singapore. |||| Our 6 night private tour of Taiwan was arranged through Wendy Wu Tours and we visited Taipei, Taroko Gorge, Sun Moon Lake, Tainan and Kaohsiung. The tour offered us just a glimpse of each of the places visited. However each place offered wonderful attractions for us to enjoy. |||| Kaohsiung is Taiwan's third largest city and its largest port. It is located in the south of the island of Taiwan around 350 kilometres from Taipei. Two highlights of our visit to this city were the Dragon and Tiger Pagodas in the Lotus Pond Scenic Area and 30 minutes from the city the magnificent Fo Guang Shan Monastery, the biggest Buddhist Monastery in Taiwan with a 48 metre high statue of the Buddha (over 100 metres tall when you include the base) making it the largest bronze Buddha statue in the world.||||For our stay in Kaohsiung Wendy Wu chose for us the very impressive Howard Plaza Hotel. ||||We really liked this hotel and we wished we had more than just an overnight here. We received a warm welcome from the friendly reception staff on arrival and the uniquely dressed Concierges attended to our luggage efficiently. We were very impressed by the large floor space for the reception area which included a delightful flower display as its centrepiece. ||||Our deluxe room had a very comfortable King bed and some elegant furnishings – nice bed chairs and a good sized writing desk and an attractive wooden cabinet for the tea and coffee making facility and the refrigerator. The bedside table had a most useful console consisting of switches for turning the lights in the room on and off including a switch for “ Make my room” and “Do not disturb”, two adaptor plugs and a USB port. That was a thoughtful feature. The view from our window offered an impressive cityscape. ||||We found the bathroom had great facilities including an efficient shower unit, separate plunge bath and an electric toilet with heated washlet. |||| The hotel boasts some great shops in its basement area selling clothes, food, wine and traveller’s needs as well as a cafe to enjoy a tea or coffee. The shopping area is very classy indeed. ||||We did not take advantage of any of the restaurants in the hotel; however we did order room service and had a delightful meal in our room instead. We enjoyed the breakfast in the morning in the restaurant. The variety of food on offer was excellent and it catered for all tastes including offering a good selection of vegetarian options. It even had a Häagen-Dazs ice cream machine for ice cream lovers to enjoy complimentary ice cream delights. ||||The hotel has an excellent outdoor swimming pool and spa on the 10th floor which I visited to take photos but not to have a swim. This facility I am sure would be very popular with hotel guests, particularly in the hot summer months. ||||We found the Howard Plaza to be a lovely hotel with great facilities and a lot of...

We stayed for 4 nights. The hotel must have been quite the hotel in its time but through no fault of its own, it has been surpassed by some of the other properties in the city. We got a room on the 17th floor overlooking the pool. Room was quite large but in need of refurbishing. Check in and reception were efficient but not overly friendly. Don't expect over the top luxury - I would liken this to an upscale Holiday Inn type property.||||We booked a package that included breakfast and the buffet had a wide variety of foods. Some other reviewers mentioned that breakfast could be hectic so we must have come at a quiet time of the year as we found it busy but was able to enjoy a leisurely breakfast.||||Probably the 2 downsides are its location. It is a 15 minute walk to the Formosa main station. In January, it was very doable but in the middle of a hot tropical steaming day, it would definitely be an issue to get out and about. Secondly, the area around the hotel doesn't have a lot of nice restaurants - there are plenty of smaller eateries that specialize in one type of food like dumplings or noodles but we had a harder time finding a place within a 2-3 block area that offered a bigger menu and beer. If I were to go to Kaohisung again (and it is a very nice city to spend some time), I'd consider properties closer to the subway lines such as the Sanduo area which has both a local buzzy night market as well as department stores that have multiple eating options and a lot of other...

Clean and well kept hotel. The breakfast has a nice selection of both western and Chinese cuisine, and the family guests really seemed to love the wide selection of Haagen-Dazs ice cream offered there. ||The room is fairly spacious. Overall quality is what you would expect from this price range. The view from the rooms aren't that pleasant, but I feel like that's more of a problem of the city itself.||||Location is not the best. As others have pointed out, it takes 10+ minutes to walk to the nearest metro station (Formosa Blvd.). There is a bike share station right next to the hotel, and as the stations are located near every metro station, I highly recommend using it (tourists just need a credit card). ||There's some nice local restaurants nearby, so I'd suggest trying those out too.||||The top floor gym / fitness centre consists of treadmills, dumbbells (up to 20kg), a lat pulldown machine, a simple bench and some crunch stands. Enough for cardio and some light lifts, but not the place for free weight lifters. Best to look for a well equipped gym in town that offers a daily / monthly pass (I was an Anytime Fitness member so I just went to a...