Travellers' Checks | Much-anticipated but delayed hotels to welcome first guests in 2018

Leading this wrap-up column last year was one of the most anticipated openings expected in 2017. That was Aman Resorts’ Amanyangyun property, which will finally begin welcoming guests on January 8. Located on the southern outskirts of Shanghai, the resort comprises salvaged Ming and Qing dynasty buildings and replanted ancient trees. It all looks very tasteful and elegant – nothing at all like the towering Bulgari Hotel Shanghai, which will occupy the top eight floors of a 40-storey tower block if and when it opens, as scheduled, later in the year.

Further north, in the Chinese capital, the Mandarin Oriental Qianmen, Beijing might be ready sometime in 2018, though not much has been heard since the place was announced in September, and no website yet exists. “Spacious and luxurious landscaped courtyard suites” near Tiananmen Square were promised for the new year “within the labyrinth of alleys and lanes in one of the city’s oldest quarters.”

Two more holdovers from 2017 are the Rosewood Luang Prabang, in Laos, and the Rosewood Phnom Penh, in Cambodia. It is expected that both openings (two of the more interesting, in terms of location, of several Rosewood launches in 2018) will take place in the next few weeks.

Raffles Hotel Singapore closed this month and should reopen with, among other new facilities, several suites named after the city’s old cinemas, in the latter part of the year. Probably not opening soon, just around the corner from Raffles, but gradually becoming a fixture on the city’s annual coming-soon list of new hotels, the Patina Capitol Singapore remains apparently ready and waiting for some mysterious commercial dispute to be resolved. It patiently occupies what was once the Capitol Theatre, a cinematic venue not memorialised by any of the new Raffles suites.

Another heritage hotel expected to open in Southeast Asia in 2018 – assuming enough tourists can still stomach visiting Myanmar under the current circumstances – is the Heritage Hotel Kempinski Yangon, which will occupy an impressive-looking 1920s courthouse on The Strand.