Creator @mamadinya2 opens her hotel review with a warning that is really a compliment: “I fear that this hotel has done more harm than good for me.” Her reason, she explains, is that she cannot picture visiting Guangzhou, China, again without staying at the LN Garden Hotel, and that she has “never in my life been treated so well.” Her caption calls it a “very late post,” but says there was no way she was skipping the review.
She says she booked one of the hotel’s top rooms through Booking.com and used the request box to write that she is a content creator who needs a nice view. She arrived at 6:30 in the evening and, she says, staff took her party to the lounge. She describes the hotel as beautiful, central, with most places about a 10 minute drive away, and she points out that it has a pork free restaurant, which matters to her because she does not eat pork. Staff, she says, gave her VIP status.
What follows in the video is a list of what that status meant in practice, and nearly every item is a case of staff remembering something she had said in passing. At breakfast, she says, the hotel asked what time she wanted to eat so a seat with a strong view could be reserved. A staff member assigned to her party stayed close by during the day, and the creator says that woman’s shift ended only when they returned to the hotel for the night.
The first example she gives involves dim sum. She and her companion enjoyed it at breakfast, and that day, she says, the hotel told her it had sent a cart of dim sum to the room because she had said she liked it. Two days into the stay, she found a note in her room saying staff had noticed she was not eating the in room snacks and asking whether there was something else they could bring. She also says the hotel invited her party to a seven course meal at a Michelin star restaurant, and that this was when she realized the staff knew about her online presence. Other hotels that have hosted her, she says, have not done this.
The smaller moments are the ones she lingers on. She says someone in the lounge area always pressed the elevator button for her until she told them she could do it herself. After a Cantonese breakfast at a large dining room in the hotel, she mentioned that she would rather have waffles. The next morning, she says, staff took her to the 30th floor, where “the chef is making your fresh waffle,” because “you’ve been craving it.”
She noticed that her attendant kept writing things down and asked what was on the list. The answer, as she tells it: on the first day staff did not know her, but they hoped to know her better if she returned, and the notes included that she loved the lobster and did not care for one particular sauce. When she left, she says, the hotel booked her a complimentary car to the airport because, in the words she quotes, “we want you to leave comfortably.” She also met the hotel’s owner, whom she calls humble and kind.
The video also addresses whether every guest would get the same treatment. She says she asked staff, and they told her VIP status “can’t be bought”: if a guest has it, the guest has it. She adds that she watched how the staff treated everyone else and saw them “run around” for every guest. She closes with the gift she received at checkout: a card with polaroid photos from the activities and restaurant bookings the hotel arranged for her, along with handwritten notes from every staff member she met. She says she plans to treat her own future clients the way she was treated.
The hotel’s own website gives a sense of the scale behind that service. According to the LN Garden Hotel’s English language site, the property has 828 guest rooms and suites plus 150 apartments, sits in a 21,000 square meter garden with 18 meter high twin waterfalls, and lists a Garden Club and Executive Lounge and a concierge desk. The site names eight dining venues in its cuisine section, including Cantonese and Turkish restaurants, and says its venues have won accolades such as the Michelin Awards. It does not describe a separate VIP program, so the details of how the creator’s status worked come only from her account.
Several of the habits she describes can be copied by a guest on any trip. She says the booking request box got her attention before she arrived, and that she mentioned small preferences out loud: dim sum at breakfast, a wish for waffles, a love of lobster. Those comments, not formal requests, were the ones staff acted on. A traveler who wants similar attention can state one or two clear preferences at check in and again on day one, and mention a dietary need early. She needed a pork free option, and the video shows a sign marking one of the hotel restaurants as pork free.
She is also clear about the limit of her claim. She says she does not know whether the treatment is part of the hotel’s culture, only that it was unlike anything she had experienced, and she compares it to a hotel in Vietnam where she was staying when she filmed the review, which she says she cannot wait to critique.
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