Founded in 2017, Secret Life of Fatbacks is a luxury travel, dining and lifestyle website which covers luxury hotel openings, hotel news and reviews. It is a companion platform to the Instagram account @larvitar. Both platforms are managed by Shawn Loh, a full-time lawyer based in Singapore. For intellectual property reasons, he is unable to name the website anything related to the titular Pokémon character. Feel free to ask him in person what “Fatbacks” refers to.
Shawn has almost a decade’s experience writing travel guides (most notably The Ultimate Guide to Singapore Hotels and The Ultimate Guide to Singapore Hotel Loyalty Programmes) as well as hotel reviews with a focus on incidental executive lounge, dining and bar experiences. He has on various occasions been the first or one of the first guests to check into or cover newly-open properties in the Asia-Pacific (e.g. Mondrian Hong Kong, Raff
Shawn is not a professional critic, blogger or photographer. He is simply a person who loves writing about food and luxury hotels very much and (likes to think that he) has a quirky sense of humour. When Shawn is not premature ageing and turning his hair further grey due to stress and vicious deadlines, he is somewhere spending an exorbitant amount of money trying out new dining places and hotels. To him, while story-telling opportunities come in many forms which include collaborations and partnerships with properties and restaurants, he firmly believes it is important to have some skin in the game and for him to pay for most of his various experiences in order to be in any position whatsoever to make observations and comments about the respective industries.
It is Shawn’s hope that, through his travel guides and hotel reviews, readers are equipped with the relevant information to make the right accommodation choices for their staycations, overseas holidays and special occasions.