Part 2 is the 2nd instalment of our 2-part series with the (2024) BYD Sealion 7 Performance. You can read Part 1 here:
After the Saturday Roaming Bar Brunch at ENSŌ Izakaya & Bar, we checked into a Club Access King room at Hyatt Regency Kuala Lumpur at KL Midtown — to experience what the hotel offers business travellers.
The room, at 42 square metres, is on the larger end for a city hotel king room, with an incredibly comfortable bed, a small lounge area doubling as an informal workspace, a 65-inch Smart HDTV (great for practising presentations!), a Lavazza coffee machine, safe (we used it to securely store our laptop), fully-equipped bathroom with separate shower stall and toilet, multiple USB ports, and a minibar.
Well-designed, functional and classy but none of it too flashy or ostentatious. The layout — a proper desk-adjacent seating area rather than a cramped corner — is the kind of detail that matters more to someone working from the room than to someone just sleeping in it.
Club Access also comes with exclusive check-in and check-out, which on a Saturday afternoon after a long brunch was a welcome shortcut past the main lobby desk, and complimentary laundry for up to three pieces per stay — staff collected the items from the room and returned them, without needing to track down a laundry bag or a drop-off counter.
The bigger draw of the Club Access tier, though, is what it unlocks elsewhere in the hotel. Guests get access to the Regency Club Lounge, and on this stay that meant an evening session from 5.30pm to 7.30pm with Paulaner draught beer, red and white wine, a small cocktail selection and spirits, alongside a spread of light bites which includes antipasto, premium cheeses, a selection of hot dishes, and even a live cooking station which offered hearty plates of pasta cooked a la minute by the chef. It is a modest offering rather than a full dinner (but could also double up as dinner if required), but as a wind-down after a boozy afternoon brunch, it worked well enough as a slower, quieter continuation of the day rather than a jarring shift in pace.
For dinner, we moved to Midtown Brasserie for the hotel’s Saturday evening buffet, which spans a wider spread featuring a range of Western and local dishes without trying to be everything to everyone. It is a straightforward hotel buffet, well-executed, and a sensible option for guests who would rather not leave the building after a day that already involved many meetings or several rounds of drinks with clients/ business contacts. Not a huge variety of dishes, but the focus was on quality instead of quantity, something I appreciate more and more as I get older.
The following morning brought a return to the Regency Club Lounge for breakfast, which is where the Club Access tier makes its clearest case: rather than queuing at a large, busy breakfast hall, club guests get a smaller, calmer room with its own spread. There’s even a dedicated family section, ensuring adult guests can enjoy a peaceful atmosphere.
Breakfast featured some surprisingly healthy options like the coconut milk chia pudding and salad, with enough hearty choices, including a wonderful selection of pastries and breads, local and Western breakfast, and a live station that prepared eggs in a variety of styles!
For consumers weighing the value here, the Club Access King room is worth considering less as a room upgrade and more as an access upgrade — the room itself is comfortable but not dramatically different from a standard category, while the lounge access, priority check-in, complimentary laundry and one hour of complimentary boardroom usage for up to 16 guests (bookable in advance, with extensions available at RM280 nett per hour) are the features doing the real work. That last perk in particular is aimed squarely at business travellers who might need a quiet space for a call or a small meeting without booking a full function room, and it is a detail unlikely to matter to a leisure guest but a genuinely useful one for anyone in Kuala Lumpur on work.
That business-traveller positioning extends well beyond the one complimentary hour. The hotel sits directly opposite the Malaysia International Trade and Exhibition Centre (MITEC), Southeast Asia’s largest convention venue, making it the closest hotel to the centre and a logical base for outstation or overseas delegates attending trade shows, exhibitions or conferences there — a short walk rather than a taxi ride between hotel room and exhibition hall.
On the hotel’s side, its 16 function rooms span 2,510 sq m across three floors, anchored by a pillarless Regency Grand Ballroom with capacity for up to 1,404 guests, putting it in a position to host the kind of conferences and corporate events that would otherwise need a separate MICE-dedicated venue.
The hotel has a host of wellness facilities: two infinity pools (one reserved for Regency Club and serviced-residence guests, the other family-friendly with a jacuzzi), and a Core Fitness Centre that ranks among the city’s larger hotel gyms, and sauna and steam facilities alongside it. Unfortunately, due to the short duration of this stay, we did not get to go for a swim or a gym session (perhaps we should come again for another stay soon!).
For a straightforward night’s stay, though, the version of the hotel this trip actually used the essentials for any business traveller: a comfortable room, an evening at the lounge, a buffet dinner and a quiet breakfast the next morning. It held up on all four counts.
Taken as a whole, the stay delivered on the basics without overreaching: a comfortable, well-proportioned room, a lounge that added enough value to justify the Club Access tier for anyone who would actually use it.
Hyatt Regency Kuala Lumpur at KL Midtown is located at No 7, Jalan Dutamas 2, 50480 Kuala Lumpur. Reservations: +603 3093 1234 or kualalumpur.regency@hyatt.com
For more info, head over to https://www.hyatt.com/hyatt-regency/en-US/kulrk-hyatt-regency-kuala-lumpur-at-kl-midtown
Part 1 of this series covered the BYD Sealion 7 Performance’s exterior design and the all-wheel-drive system underpinning its 4.5-second 0-100 km/h time. This second instalment turns to what the driver and passengers experience once inside, and to the safety systems working quietly in the background over a weekend of ordinary use.
BYD describes the Sealion 7’s interior as inspired by sailboat racing, an idea reflected in a dashboard layout that curves toward the driver rather than running flat across the cabin. The centrepiece is a 15.6-inch touchscreen that rotates between landscape and portrait orientation, a feature that proved genuinely useful rather than gimmicky — portrait mode suited navigation, while landscape felt more natural for media and split-screen views in city traffic. Alongside it sits a separate 10.25-inch driver display and a head-up display projected onto the windscreen, keeping speed and navigation prompts in the driver’s line of sight without a glance down.
Seats are trimmed in quilted leather, with BYD citing vegan leather across more than 80 per cent of the remaining interior surfaces. Both front seats are power-adjustable, with the driver’s seat including position memory and four-way lumbar adjustment — a detail that mattered on the longer highway stretches, where lower-back support tends to be the first thing drivers notice on a two-hour drive.
A huge panoramic glass roof runs the length of the cabin, brightening what is otherwise a dark-themed interior, and rear passengers get their own air-conditioning vents, a consideration often left out of SUVs pitched primarily on driver-focused performance. A wireless charging pad is built into the centre console alongside cupholders and covered storage, and the console itself carries physical drive controls rather than burying every function in the touchscreen.
Connectivity runs through wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, a 12-speaker Dynaudio sound system, and two USB-C and USB-A ports across both rows — enough for four devices to charge simultaneously without cable-sharing arguments on a family trip. Entry and start are keyless, with an NFC digital key allowing a smartphone or card to unlock and start the vehicle, useful for sharing access with a second driver without duplicating a physical key.
With a 2,930mm wheelbase, rear-seat space is generous by the standards of the segment, with enough knee room for adult passengers on a two-hour drive without complaint. Boot capacity is rated at 500 litres, sufficient for a weekend’s luggage for a small family, and the foot-activated tailgate detailed in Part 1 makes loading easier when hands are already full. A frunk-style front storage capacity of 58 litres — modest, but enough for a charging cable — adds a small amount of additional practicality that combustion SUVs cannot match.
The Sealion 7 Performance carries BYD’s Advanced Driver Assistance Systems suite, which includes predictive collision warning, adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning and prevention, and traffic sign recognition that displays posted speed limits on the driver display. A driver attention warning system monitors for signs of fatigue over longer drives, while door open warning alerts occupants to approaching traffic or cyclists before a door is opened — relevant on the narrower streets and roadside parking common in parts of the Klang Valley, where dooring incidents involving motorcyclists are a recurring road safety concern.
Parking is assisted by front and rear sensors and a 360-degree camera system, features that proved incredibly useful in tighter car parks and narrow parking bays. The car’s structure includes front, side, curtain and driver’s-side airbags, along with ISOFIX child seat anchors in the rear for families carrying young passengers.
Braking hardware includes ventilated and drilled front discs, paired with the same iTAC torque management system described in Part 1, which BYD says also improves stability under hard braking by adjusting torque distribution between the axles.
Across two days and a mixed route of city centre traffic, navigating suburb streets, and highway running, the Sealion 7 Performance’s cabin and safety systems did more to shape the experience than the outright performance figures covered in Part 1.
A rotating display that earns its novelty, seats comfortable enough for a longer drive, large cabin space, a host of handy features, and a driver-assistance suite that intervenes without becoming intrusive add up to a high-performance SUV that’s way more capable than just its (incredible!) 0-100 km/h time.
BYD Sime Motors recently launched the refreshed 2026 Sealion 7 range featuring a new variant and upgrades across the two existing variants!
Photos shot by the author using the vivo X300 Pro and Samsung Galaxy S25 FE.
timchew.net 