I have some friends who like to hotel hop when going on vacation. This means that they check into a hotel, enjoy the amenities, spend the night there, pack up and check out in the morning, bring all their stuff along with them while on tourist activities, then show up at their next hotel and check in after their day is over. There are obviously some refinements you can make to this, such as only swapping hotels every few days, or only bringing luggage if you have a rental car and otherwise leaving it with the bell desk so you don’t have to carry it all around everywhere. Regardless, this is a way to optimize for having more experiences in a new city, including their lodging.
Although full-blown hotel hopping is a bit too intense for me, I did a very mild variant of it during my trip to Hong Kong. Upon first arriving, I stayed at the JW Marriott Hotel Hong Kong connected to the Pacific Place mall in Admiralty. Part-way through my stay, I transferred hotels to The Park Lane Hong Kong, Autograph Collection in Causeway Bay. I picked these two hotels not only because they were under the Marriott brand so I could get the most out of my loyalty perks, but also because they were in very different neighborhoods with very different hotel themes and vibes.
On the day that I transferred to The Park Lane, the area in front of my new hotel was extraordinarily congested. It was packed enough that I barely even had room to pull my carry-on luggage with me without constantly bumping it into other people around me. At that time, I couldn’t really tell whether this neighborhood was just substantially busier than I had originally realized, or if there was a special event going on.
After doing some research online, I found out that the Hong Kong Flower Show was taking place at Victoria Park across the street from my hotel. I actually had the great fortune of having an east-facing view from my high-floor hotel room, so I was able to clearly see the entire Flower Show from my window. Because this is a seasonal event and it looked like an interesting place to sightsee, I went downstairs, crossed the street, and checked it out in-person.
I think this might have potentially been the most densely-packed tourist activity I’ve ever done. I was almost shoulder-to-shoulder with other people for some portions of it. To make things worse, everyone was busy taking selfies, so the crowd was stagnant and not really moving. I didn’t want to contribute to the problem, so you’ll notice that a majority of the pictures I took have lots of other people in them; I didn’t want to “wait my turn” for others to clear out of the area like other people were doing. I partially regret compounding this issue by also going in the middle of the day on a weekend, but I guess this was part of the Hong Kong experience.
The event itself (at least what I could see of it) was pretty nice. There was a lot to see, and some of the flower arrangements were actually quite impressive. Here is a somewhat random assortment of photographs that I took throughout my visit:
