aloft Beijing, Haidian — Hotel in Beijing

By far this is the worst Starwood property I've ever stayed at. To be fair, the room is decent and relatively clean.

Here are the things that are worth mentioning.

The staff:

Poorly trained. I can understand that this is China, most people here do not speak English and I respect that, however, in hospitality business, especially for Starwood standard, they should at least understand and speak basic English. If I were to rate their English competency in a scale 1 to 10, I'd give 3 at most.

Upon arrival, it took a while for them to locate my reservation because it seems like if you provide a document in Roman Alphabet, they have a hard time understanding it. Once they found my reservation, they didn't offer/mention any room upgrade (SPG Gold benefit) or welcome bonus, which at that point, I didn't really care for it anymore. They proceeded by scanning my passport as well as my mothers. In addition to my biometric page and my visa, I'm not so sure why they scanned the cover of my passport as well. What's interesting and sort of funny, they scanned my mom's US visa instead of Chinese visa - my mother had to tell and explain to them that that was a US visa, not a Chinese visa. After 15-20 minutes, we were finally checked in and provided room keys. During the entire check in process, there was no smile whatsoever.

The room:

As I mentioned earlier, the room was decent and fairly clean. But within the first 30 minutes after we got in, we found that the sink wasn't working properly - the sink drain stopper didn't want to pop up which clogged the water. At that time, it was already 2am in the morning due to a late check-in. We called the receptionist and they said there was only one guy working so it took a while for him to show up. it took him 30-40 minutes to come to our room - It was almost 3am. Once he came, it didn't take very long to fix the issue.

The second day, the problem occurred again!! We had to call the plumber again to fix it. It seems like the quality of work and the building material aren't that great - never noticed such things before at Starwood properties I've stayed before.

The Wifi:

Poor!!! I was planning to do some work on my trip. It was nearly impossible to do so. The wifi signal was strong, but the bandwidth and speed is really bad. You could barely use it to send messages over WhatsApp. From a lot of people I talk to, apparently it is very common in China unless you have their native apps or accessing their native websites. I seriously wouldn't rely on their Wifi, especially if you have to make a conference call over VoIP.

Location:

The location isn't too bad. But property is not located anywhere near attractions and touristy places. The distance from the hotel to the closest Subway is around 2 km - which is still a walking distance in my opinion. The cab ride from the airport (late night) was around 150 RMB - going to the airport is slightly cheaper.

Overall:

This is my first time staying at Aloft. Would I give another chance to stay at Aloft property again? Yes. Would I stay at this Aloft Haidian again? No.

But the thing is that, it is not easy to find a property in Beijing to meet your expectation if you are used to Starwood standard worldwide. If you notice, even Sheraton in Beijing has bad reviews. So please do a lot of research before making a reservation at any hotel in...

From check-in I could tell this was going to be bad. Poor English, no SPG recognition, no queue management,.

Called reception to ask a question, 3 calls later with no answer despite leaving the phone to ring for 5 mins each time I went to the reception. 3 staff all on their mobiles and only one that could speak English. Was told they were too busy to pick up the phone...

That evening trying to get a drink at the bar, waited almost 15 mins no sign of any staff. Went to reception, was told again they were too busy. I was the only one at the bar, in fact except for me and 2 guys playing pool (later found out that they were staff who just ignored me) we were the only people in the bar or restaurant area.

Asked for four towels from day one, never received them and so shared towels...

The telephone would ring in the room in the middle of the night and I would hear a "sorry" and then hang up. This happened more than once each night so we unplugged the phone.

BBQ special offered with quality and selection very limited unless you like to eat soft bones of chicken or other very local combinations. Service there was also very poor and so we left, we could not stand it anymore.

Asked to speak to a manager and was told there were none available and I could make an appointment to complain during business hours - SERIOUSLY!!

Planned to check out and move to another hotel but with children etc and arrangements for sight seeing near to Haidian we ended up staying to avoid the hassle.

Ended up speaking to a manager after getting so frustrated that I insisted to speak to someone. They initially sent a guest services officer to talk to me who just listened and said sorry, then the guest services manager arrived (this whilst I was swimming in the ice water pool) and offered a complimentary dinner at the adjacent Four Points. I accepted despite not really wanting a dinner as needed to see some kind of reaction.

Dinner was terrible, it was the buffet in the all day dining restaurant. The food that was out was cold, chicken from the grill was not cooked, asked for pizza as they ran out and was told no. Asked the waiting staff again and it finally arrived after we finished desert. The sashimi was dripping water as had clearly been frozen and tasted terrible. Not what I had hoped for. I felt embarrassed about the amount of food that we did not eat.

Do not stay at either this or the accompanying...

The Four Points by Sheraton Hotel / the Aloft Hotel belong to all the same Marriott SPG Hotel Group and it's basically even connected to each other. The swimming pool of the Aloft hotel was closed and I've asked for a solution to let an Aloft guest have access to a swimming pool at the Four Points Hotel and I was asked to pay RMB 100, than I did - upon check-in- agreed with the reception to have a Gold Member Late-Check-Out at 4pm, and even it showed it on the Mobile application, "you're all set for 4pm late check-out" and guess what: at not even 2 pm someone already knocked on my door and asked me whether I forgot to checkout, which is unacceptable. The pool table in the lobby is extremely old and dirty, the restaurant looks like a school cantene, I was sitting at the bar the other day and there was no one that cared, when I just walked over the reception they pointed at a pack of condoms and a shaving kit, in a board and told me that I can also buy a sandwich over there, which is absolutely meaningless. Overall, Aloft is not worth paying a visit, I just moved to the Four Points instead, the Aloft is really bad. While taking a shower at my room, the whole place quickly turned into a swimming pool already, seems like the waterfall system doesn't work after all. The fridge in the room was probably created by William Shakespeare, loads of noise for nothing, it hardly cooled anything and created just loudness. In fact I like my water cold and added 5 bottles of water, guess what, after 4 nights it was just like the other bottles outside, just like room temperature. The Gym was all right, but that doesn't cover up the...