Zhongguan Xinyuan Global Village PKU — Hotel in Beijing

Based on a stay in Building 1, the hotel is basically good, but with a mixture of positive and negative features:||Pros: Located very near East gate of Peking University, and convenient to subway station. Rooms are large, clean, and quiet. The beds are comfortable and the carpeting is thick. Bathroom has modern fixtures.||Cons: Tap water is not drinkable (not their fault, and they provide bottled water to use instead). No heat is available in the rooms until mid-November. We stayed in October and the room never got above 68 deg F (quite chilly for us). Beware if you're visiting in the Fall. The room has many light fixtures, but they're all so feeble that the room is dimly lit. Electrical outlets are much sparser than you find in current U.S. motels, so you probably can't charge all your devices at once. There's a flat screen TV, but it shows only one English language news channe, and the sound from all channels is distorted to the point that music sounds bad. No alcohol is served in the hotel. Breakfast buffet options are less Western than you might think, and they don't warm the serving trays at all, so foods that are supposed to be eaten hot are cold and unappealing when you get them. Finally, most of the reception desk staff have very limited English skills and little interest in customer satisfaction. It can be hard to find one fluent enough to handle a situation that is even slightly out of the ordinary. This is not appropriate for a "Global Village" hotel catering to foreign visitors. And if there are a few guests present at the desk at once, the scene can become very chaotic, loud, and slow (just like Beijing traffic (!) Proper management could greatly...

Booked the Duplex Suite and its a loft room. However, being a single business traveler, the 1st level is left untouched and under utilized. There was a couch, TV, wardrobe, table, chair and even a toilet on level 1. Very nice full length window which makes the whole room very classy. ||||As mentioned, I spent most of my time upstairs where the bed was. There was rain shower and a bathtub and a spacious toilet. Bed was good, pillow was comfortable. There is also a television upstairs too. I guess the down side is the lack of powerpoints upstairs. Only 1 beside the bed and 1 in the toilet means for the hair dryer.||||I reached the hotel bright and early after a 6 hours red eye flight. But there was no room for me, staffs mentioned they are all full. Asked me to wait at the lobby till check in time at 1pm. TIme check: 7am. I got them to help me get a temp room just so that I can catch some sleep before my meeting at about 2pm, but they insisted they have no room. So I sat at the lobby's coach for 5 hours. Went up to check if anyone checked out so that I can have a temp room but their answer was no. I would really appreciate if they could even offer me a bottled water during that 5 hours wait. There is a cafe there but I was just too tired to move my butt. ||||Dozed off on the coach a few times and finally went up to ask if my room was ready at 12.30pm. It was then that they started to check me in. Questioned them on why I had to be the one to ask them for it instead of they coming over to tell me the room was ready when they knew I was sitting there for the past 5 hours. Just a mumble to say that the room was JUST ready.||||Service was non-existent, is this how...

This is an update of my review in 2014. I've since stayed another two more times (in August 2015 and May 2016). Sadly, the quality of the rooms has deteriorated markedly from my previous visits. The most intolerable aspect is that every room, every corridor, every nook and cranny in the hotel now reek of cigarettes. Apparently, they don't separate their rooms for smokers and non-smokers --- a huge problem as many Mainland Chinese are chain smokers. The first time I stayed here was right after the hotel opened its doors and so the smell wasn't noticeable. The second and third times I stayed here, the smell of cigarettes became noticeably more pronounced but was still tolerable. Now it's simply gone the way of Beijing's AQI --- air quality at this hotel probably isn't much better indoor than outdoor. Also, construction works in China are apparently not built to last --- the five-year-old hotel feels like it's twenty years old. Things were fine when I first stayed in this hotel but they (plumbing, air conditioning, wi-fi, etc) start to go wrong over my subsequent visits and the hotel seems disinterested in fixing the defects. From my experience, this is consistent with Mainland Chinese's penchant for initial grandeur at the expense of subsequent maintenance --- they have no qualms investing a staggering amount of resource on a glamorous project that will win them bragging rights at inauguration but have little interest in the mundane task of upkeeping. PKU built a fabulous hotel and watch it fall apart, preferring to move on to its next...