Holiday Inn Beijing Deshengmen — Hotel in Beijing

We stayed here for eight nights in July. Thank goodness my husband's work provided a translator to pick us up at the airport as she was able to get us checked in and arrange for a fan for our very warm hotel room. We did not find most of the front desk staff friendly or very good at speaking and understanding English. If we wanted to communicate with them, we needed to use the iTranslate App. (I highly recommend using a translate App). Dorothea and Sally were helpful on our last morning at checkout, with the help of my husband's translator, to help us track down a parcel we had been expecting.||The Cafe provided a good breakfast and I'm sure if you were staying here just for a couple of nights, it would be perfect. Chinese and Western food. But by about day 4, we were both tired of the exact same food with no variation whatsoever. They do provide pancakes and french toast, but no maple syrup. They ran out on the second day. I tried asking for it but they do not understand.||Cafe staff: Thank you to Lisa, who spoke English and stopped each day to chat, and also Freda, who did try to understand and communicate with us.||No one in the restaurant on the second floor could speak a word of English. They did not even understand basics. There are a number of good restaurants in the neighbourhood that I would recommend eating at before I would go back to the one in the hotel. We were exhausted night one and didn't know where to eat so we went there but I would not recommend it, unless you're desperate like we were. The food was good. Service - not so much. Language barrier made it difficult.||Cigarette smoke is everywhere in the halls and rooms. Even in the health club. YUCK. I am not sure where it is coming from but you smell it constantly. When we arrived home from our trip, we had to launder even the clothes that we did not wear because they smelled of cigarette smoke. Even though our understanding is that the hotel is smoke free, people must not care and they still smoke. It was a huge negative for me as I spent a lot of time in the room while my husband was working, and it was gross. Walking on a treadmill and smelling cigarette smoke is even worse.||We tried to order a mixed drink in the bar but the girls could not understand vodka and soda. We tried showing them what we wanted. Still no luck. My husband went behind the bar and pointed to vodka and soda and then basically had to make the drink himself. We planned on meeting in the bar each night when he was done work but we never went back. Instead, we went to the convenience store directly beside the hotel and bought beer and coolers and drank them in our hotel room. Super cheap!||The hotel is clean, as are the rooms. The lotus flowers outside each elevator are such a nice touch! The amenities in the room are probably some of the most extensive I've seen. If you forget anything at home, it will likely be provided in the room. Our hotel room cleaning lady was very friendly and did a wonderful job keeping our room clean and stocked with amenities.||If we returned to the area in the future, I hope that they have dealt with the smoking situation and further training for hotel staff to be more welcoming.||SUGGESTION: Provide staff with phones that have a Translate App installed. It would be less frustrating for them, and less frustrating for your clientele. We found that some of the restaurants in the area would use a translate app to communicate with us and it made ordering a breeze. If they don't understand other languages, provide them with tools that help them. Win/Win...

Don’t believe all the 5-star reviews - I don’t think most of them are real. I’m a regular stayer at this hotel due to work with my colleagues (no choice), and it is a 3-star+ at best. Main issues are there is no in-room air conditioning, as both heating and cooling are controlled centrally by the hotel. Not an issue in Beijing during temperate weather, but can be a major problem when it is either too hot or too cold. Worst, some guests still smoke in their rooms, so the lack of climate control means smoky air can drift back through to other rooms via the air vents in the bathroom. One of my colleagues recently had a measured PM2.5 reading of 393 micrograms per cubic metre in their room, more than 10x the WHO guidance for what is good for human health, and had to be moved urgently due to symptoms of severe coughing, runny eyes and nose. (Suggest you don’t stay here if you suffer from asthma or other pulmonary issues.)

Hotel also looking dated in most rooms, even executive ones on the top two floors. Plus they recently did away with ‘Happy Hour’ at the weekends for Elite Members, which is an extra annoyance (the lounge was discontinued in 2022, and pool in 2012). Apart from that, this is a pretty standard Holiday Inn, with the usual pro’s and con’s, as long as you are not paying a premium, it’s ok. On the plus side, some of the staff are good, particular the tall manager Steven. Breakfast also has good choice, above average, but not outstanding by any means. It lacks a bar for socialising, but has a cafe restaurant opposite reception area. I would have given it a 3-star rating this time, but moved this lower solely to balance (after discovering) the dubious other reviews, which are misleading in my view. More investment is needed really to bring this hotel back up to its originally claimed 4-star standard, but we see no real effort/desire by the owners/managers to address the more major...

In general, this hotel has provided a good amount of amenities and room space for the value it is intending to offer. Rooms are large enough to accomodate business travelers and internet is quite fast to get you online.

The hotel in general is clean and has well organized staff for dealing with customer inquiries, housekeeping, and food requests.

The beds in the hotel are on the slightly hard side, which is nice because quite often hotels can have something that can break your back because of its softness. This bed provides enough support with the nice touch of being to select hard or soft pillows right on your bed.

There's enough working space, little mini bar, and arm chair for you to relax. The showers in the room have the over head waterfall type as well as the hand held spray type, which is always a great way to decompress.

Some good areas of the hotel are the little courtyard with greenery view from the lobby cafe. The lobby area is also a nice welcome, higher end than what you expect from even your Holiday Inns in the United States.

In general, for the price, it is a above average value in context to Beijing's various hotels. Also, having the Holiday Inn standard helps to ensure that the basics and essentials are at least taken care of which can be an issue sometimes with other mid-tier hotels. The location could be better because of lack of access to subways, but taxis are easy...