Where to stay in Singapore?

I’ve been scouring for a place for Cart to stay during his visit this december.

Cartcart wasn’t choosy about his accommodations, the only requirement was that the room needed to be air-conditioned and I prefer that it be affordable. The first thing that came to mind was ‘Hotel 81’ – one of the best known budget hotels in Singapore.

I’ve already reserved a room, and luckily for us, there were still some available at the time though I was pretty certain that it will be fully booked soon due to the peak season of Christmas and the new year.

Peak season! They charged extra on the holidays! On typical days they charged about $50 – $90 for a room for a day. I did my calculations and my heart skipped a beat. $950+

Woah! That’s kind of pricey. Isn’t there any alternatives? For that price, I could rent a fully furnished apartment. However, Juli said that the minimum length of time required for rental was a month. Cart would only be staying for 9 days.

Some of the nice people from the forums had some great ideas. One that I liked in particular was the ntuc chalet that costs $70 a day. Unfortunately, some of the dates during the week were already booked. It would be inconvenient to keep changing accommodations during the stay.

So it’s back to to square one. I wasn’t satisfied.

After a search on google, I discovered a page which recommended ‘service apartments’. It said that it was more economical and had a more homelier feel to it. It was like a hotel, but larger and had amenities where you could cook, wash among others.

The more I read and the more I looked, the more attracted I was to the whole deal.

Doesn’t these look gorgeous?

Living room at The Lotus at Joo Chiat.

Deluxe rooms at Metropolitan Y Apartments

And unfortunately they were all fully booked. I even went to the extent of checking each and every one of the links here to see if there were any available.

In the end, I had a reply from Valuestay which had a room for $100 dollars a night which was reasonable. But it excludes utility rates, no kitchen and you had to pay $500 upfront as deposit.

Ouch! Plus I don’t even know what the room looks like as there’s no picture of the rooms to be found in the website anywhere.

As now, we’d have to stick to the original plan. Anyway, it’s near to a lot of interesting places like the National Library, and the Esplanade. I do hope there will be some interesting events there in december! 🙂

What do you think? Do you have any suggestions?