Intercontinental Chongqing Raffles City — Hotel in Chongqing

Was passing through Chongqing on the way back from a meeting in Chengdu and stayed here for a couple of nights.

Lovely hotel overlooking the confluence of the Yangtze and Jingling rivers. However, this is not the easiest Intercontinental hotel to find if you are not using a taxi!!! It is actually straight forward to get from the airport on public transport. There is a direct metro link towards town from the terminal 3 (line 10, 13 stops I think), which takes you on to the peninsula where the hotel is situated, where you then change to the red Line (1) to its end at Chaotianmen station. This metro station is within the Raffles city shopping complex. So come out of the metro station turn left into the shopping centre and take the lift, which is about 20 – 30 meters in front of you as you enter the shopping centre. Then take this lift down to floor “LG”. The hotel entrance is then about 20 m in front of you on your right. Enter this underground reception area and then take a lift up to the lobby.

Hotel lobby is on the 42 floor with lovely views over the rivers and the city. The lobby area is contained in the circular tube that can been seen in the pics of the hotel. It also houses two restaurants and the club lounge.

Good selection of food for breakfast, at least for western tastes, in the lounge. Also offers free drinks (tea/coffee/soft drinks) all day with nibbles in the afternoon and wine/beer etc in the evening again with a range of nibbles for people who stay in a “club” room.

Restaurant botanica offers a buffer or an al carte menu for dinner in the evening, with a good choice of food. There are other restaurants also available in the hotel, but I did not use them.

Lovely, upgraded bedroom, due to my Ambassador status as part of IHG, which overlooked the Yangtze river. Very comfortable king bed with a view over the river that you can lie in bed in and watch. Smallish bathroom with both shower and bath, but with a separate toilet on the other side of corridor from the room’s door.

Small and rather useless desk if you really have work to do, but fine for writing e-mails etc and similar things. Plugs on the wall for easy access for computer and phone charging etc all at table height.

The room also provided a view over the city so you could watch the good light show that goes on in the early evening.

The club staff were lovely, very friendly and always wanting to assist you and bring food or drinks to fulfil your needs, very good.

Would I recommend this hotel, certainly. It was not cheap but good value for what you would have to pay for a similar hotel standard in Europe. Staff were friendly and helpful and makes it a...

Once every few months we come into the city to stay at a hotel for a relaxing experience and to unwind. We choose this hotel 99% of the time. Here are the things I loved about my stay:

I loved the way that Candance went out of her way to remember our names and help us with anything that we needed. The free drink voucher is always a nice touch we get with our membership. I also like the way that the morning staff learned our routine of always having jasmine tea, we even do this at home lol. I love the executive lounge and strongly suggest you book a room with this access. They offer three times to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner. The food is always amazing including the wonderful soup, nice sweets and amazing breakfast. I left some photos below of the amazing food.

Harry the bell man was amazing in helping us get our luggage into the car. The downstairs staff ws so helpful with our packages we had to send it really made a difference.

I suggest you get a corner room so you can have more window space and views.

Usually the rooms are very clean however we felt this time it was not as clean as usual. For example there was grease stains on the welcome letter, old food/debris on the floor and the insides of the windows had stickiness and needed to be clean. Also in the toilet room it seemed as if the floor wasn’t clean so we ended up washing down the room everyday ourself, I feel like with a hotel at this price range these shouldn’t be issues.

The lack of cleanliness in some of the areas was a concern. For example in the girls locker room there was debris/ paper all over the floor and it was extremely wet making it very slippery.

The location is amazing of the hotel, right next to it is a mall with a grocery store and many places to eat and spend money. We love it! There is milk tea, hot pot, soup and other wonderful options as well as western food. On the 3rd floor of the mall there is a bristo which has amazing food as well.

We ordered room service, everytime we come we order the same thing, this time when we ordered the ceaser salad the chicken was so small and it did not have the anchovies. When we called and mentioned it they said it was the same, however being a lover of food I actually had a photo of the last one and we compared and it was VEYR different. They did send up another chicken so we were pretty happy about that.

We didn’t get a chance to eat at the restaurants but we did walk through it and it had a...

Overall my stay experience is less than my expectation, only appreciate my dining experience at the bar SHUA!

Bartender and a staff named Derrick and Andy, their good attitude take care of me and my family well, offer us warm service and fulfilled our expectations! Also the special cocktail is taste good and match with Chongqing theme! Seafood tower and oyster platter really fresh and yummy! Good experience at the bar!!!!

However, feeling sad with some points as below;

1. Botanica breakfast buffet:

There are no choice of milk with coffee, such as Oat, Soy, almond, even my wife love drink jasmine tea, but there are only English breakfast and green tea, rejected and no alternatives! But I can find room offer jasmine tea with complement …..

2. Swimming pool;

We plan to go the pool only enjoy the jacuzzi and took some photo only at 19:00, when we enter inside the pool, the staff just strictly told us here need to wear swimming cap instead of greeting first, of course we know the policy at China. Therefore, the first impression is really really bad to us.

Moreover, lifeguard is not proactively offer water and help us spread the towel on the bench, even here don’t have others guest, I can say no service here. Really disappointed!

Finally, before my C/O just want to find some iconic place to keep some memory here, I have found 2 icon board nearby the Maven, I took some photo at the staircase with my wife already!

After I saw another one at the Maven inside, the board called

When I saw the place and I’m really heartbeat to have 1 photo here, I’m just politely to ask the man staff at the Maven reception, but he rejected us directly as the reason is if other guests saw us and also go up to take, I can’t control it, but when I saw the floor at the restaurant, only 4 guests at far with the place that I want to take, that I’m really disappointed and unacceptable with that reason! Even we are not spending much of time on it ( only 2 mins...