Jingyi Hotel — Hotel in Beijing

I've stayed at more than 200 hotels, hostels, and other accommodations in China over the last 17 years for travel, business, and family. Therefore, I can say with confidence, this is the worst hotel in Beijing and possibly all of China.||||The room was not ready, as promised at 3:30 PM (had to wait two hours and hassle with bag storage formalities - which is complicated and time-consuming in China). My 3 young daughters were wiped out from the long flight, but the nap I promised was just not possible thanks to an oversight that I might have forgiven if the rest of the stay had been somewhat nice.||||Immediately after reaching the room, I called the front desk to let them know the air conditioning was not working (90 degrees F in the room). 3 hours later, they sent someone who looked at it but did not fix it.||||Next morning, I asked for A/C repair. Hours later, a man with a ladder came in, opened a ceiling panel, fiddled with something, and then, in Chinese, said, "Don't expect much from this A/C."||||After sweating to death all night, we head to the breakfast buffet. This is a scam, as however many people your room is designed for, you only get 50% breakfast tickets. So a 2-person room gets 1 free breakfast ticket. The second ticket costs about 60 RMB, which is crazy high in China for a breakfast. It's a trick, as you can't use yesterday's ticket for your room guest, etc.||||Expect soggy steamed buns (they don't allow you to get more than 2 of these), tepid milk for your off-brand cereal, heat-lamp french fries, fish sticks, salad, cold fried eggs, and some rather tasty cakes. The cakes were the highlight of an otherwise awkward and unpleasant breakfast. In short, eat elsewhere. Chinese breakfast can be a delicious experience, this hotel is a disgrace to both Chinese and Western breakfast.||||While coffee (including the Nestcafe machine), sugary juice-flavored drinks, and tea are included, water (and I presume soda) is charged at a premium. Just go 50 meters down the street to the shop, and buy your water for 2 RMB per bottle, instead of 5 RMB at the buffet. You can bring it in, as rules are different in China.||||There is a pool and fitness center in the basement of this hotel, but there is a huge fee to use it (not included with the room).||||They restock your Jingyi Hotel branded water bottles in your room each day. The water has a faint essence of gasoline. Again, a little store is a 1-minute walk from the front gate of the lobby to get your own water.||||I also needed to borrow some scissors at the front desk. They refused to let me borrow the ones in their drawer, and said they would send someone to my room with some. Hours later, it was 11 PM still no scissors. I called and asked if they could instead schedule the scissors for the next morning. They asked for a time, and I said 8 AM. No scissors at 8, waited until 9, asked again. Nothing for hours. Finally, when we came back from lunch, scissors were on the desk in the room. This is not rocket science!||||I asked for a late checkout at 2PM since my departing flight was at 6PM. The keys expired at noon. They reset the key and sent me back to my top floor room a total of 5 times over an hour with key cards that did not unlock the door (standing in line each time at the front desk, only to be issued another non-working key). They refused to send anyone up to the room with me to witness or help with the nonfunctional key card.||||The air conditioning was never fixed during the stay (asked repeatedly for repair). The room was never a comfortable temperature. Even the lobby, and especially the air in the open-air hall near the roof of the hotel was scorching. ||||I demanded a discount for the non-working A/C and the intolerable way the key card problem was handled. I was renting the 2000-RMB-per-night presidential suite for 3 nights. A terrible customer service representative initially refused to do anything. He also refused to let me see the manager. Finally, he pretended to call the manager on the phone (the pauses in Chinese were all wrong for a two-way phone conversation, so I am nearly sure he was faking). He discounted the room by 200 RMB (not per day, but off the total), and handed me two free breakfast buffet tickets that I could not use because I was obviuously leaving. Less than a 4% discount for the worst customer service and conditions that I have ever encountered in China? I've had awesome stays at family-run hotels in China that cost just 100 RMB per night.||||The Jingyi hotel is supposed to be a luxary hotel. However, they must have been trained by Soviet-era specialists in the art of customer service and satisfaction.||||I stayed here only because the location was near where my in-laws live in Beijing. Otherwise, the location is not great unless you are heading to the universities or Walmart. Though it's inside the city, and Haidian District is not a bad place (upper middle-class area...

When you arrive you will be impressed. Shiny marble everywhere. More plants than most garden centres. An atrium with glass lifts gliding quietly up and down. A little Chinese lady constantly sweeping unseen dust from the floors. A comfortable seating area and entire row of check in clerks who all look busy!||Make the most of that feeling because almost every other aspect of the hotel could be improved. At the check-in not one of the clerks could speak English. Not a big deal, but if you are going make your hotel view-able and bookable on English speaking websites... The check-in was relatively easy as we were able to point at various pages we had printed about our booking. ||The room was acceptable, not perfect, but satisfactory. By our third day I was beginning to notice dirty bits behind the door that were clearly never cleaned. The bathroom was nice, but never felt completely clean. The water in the sink was never hot, but not cold enough to complain. The bathroom was ventilated but not quite enough to make it smell fresh. The beds were fine, but not sumptuous.||There is an upmarket restaurant attached to the hotel. Very expensive but looked very nice - although I am not sure if Sea Cucumbers are edible. There is also a bar - but I did not see anyone in it the whole time we were there. The buffet restaurant had a good selection of Chinese food for breakfast, but very little in the way of Western cuisine. Lots of staff that do not appear to do much. Food, drinks and crockery would often run out during breakfast, but went unnoticed by the staff. I am fairly laid back about this sort of thing - and very English when it comes to complaining! But even I was forced to say something when the only thing available for coffee was a soup bowl. :)||If you have not been to China before then food may be an issue. Restaurant menus are full of dishes that you will not recognise even with a translation! If I had been travelling alone I would have been braver, but my children are not so adventurous. Fortunately, there is a McDonalds, a KFC and a Pizza Hut all within easy walking distance. Interestingly they all had additional items on their menus to appeal to local tastes. ||The lack of understanding of English in Beijing initially surprised me - even at the Forbidden City we only found one person that spoke some English - but it is quite clear that domestic tourism will always be far greater than tourists from around globe. On this holiday we also visited Hong Kong, Macau and Guangzhou (Southern China) where a much larger number of people spoke English.||On our second day we discovered a member of the reception staff that spoke some English. Combined with the translator on my phone this made a huge difference to us. We were able to get some help and advice - even if it was just to find out where the McDonalds was!||This website (and others) make a big fuss about the fact that the hotel has a pool. It was one of the reasons we booked this hotel. Well, actually it doesn't. There is a pool and gym on site, but it is not owned by the hotel. If you want to swim it will cost you around £10 GBP per person, per swim. As a family, we often take advantage of hotels pools, with a short swim in the morning and a leisurely one in the late afternoon. The pool itself is not very big (and again it did not feel 100% clean), the water is freezing and you WILL get shouted at for not wearing a swimming hat! £10 may not sound a lot - but when you consider that a taxi ride to the hotel from the other side of Beijing in the rush hour cost less than £10. Needless to say we only swam once!||Overall, I liked the hotel, but felt they needed some guidance on how to run a hotel and what customers expect. I have rated it Average which is possibly a bit harsh, but I do not believe it deserves the next rating up which is very good. This could be a really nice hotel, with a bit more effort and some...

Traveling on business, I was booked by my hosts into this hotel for 2 weeks. I do not speak Chinese, and almost no one on the hotel staff spoke any English, which made for some "interesting" challenges. The most positive aspect of my stay was the room itself. It was large and quiet, able to be cooled to a livable temperature, with a bed that was very firm but manageable for me. The breakfast seemed to be enjoyed by the Chinese guests, but the exotic (to me) Chinese food (many, many varieties) was often not warm, and sometimes not what was labeled (e.g., no chicken in the "chicken and mushrooms"), and there were no options for Western tastes. The hotel was kept very warm in July, uncomfortably so for me. The air inside the hotel was hazy, as the outside air in Beijing was very thick and smoggy for most of the days I was there. Mercifully, there were two air purifiers in my cooled-down room, which I kept running most of the time, but even the inside air had a bit of a smoggy smell and taste. (That is, of course, more of a Beijing issue than a hotel-specific issue). As other reviewers have noted, I found that the hotel-provided water had a distinctive, unpleasant chemical aftertaste, which required my stocking up on bottled water from the very conveniently located...