Intercontinental Dalian — Hotel in Dalian City

I consider this hotel to be absolute fabulous, comfortable and great service. Hotel staff were super! The front desk staff, housekeeping staff are always great -- friendly! The staff at the cafe@6 are outstanding. They are extremely attentive and friendly! Coffee is always filled without being asked! I always feel like at home when I stay here. I wish I could remember the name of each staff member at Cafe@6 who provided me with great service. Do know that I am very appreciative of their outstanding service. They deserve special recognition! I just wish I could speak the local language so that I would do this personally.

I have been in China since mid-January and also been working in 3 different cities (Dalian, Wuhan and ChengDu). Having to stay in Dalian during the Spring Festival while my colleagues returned to their hometown to be with their family, this city is quiet to say the least during this period of time. The hotel staff went out of their way to make me feel comfortable here and seemed to know me personally upon check-in!. There were many memorable experiences but I won't forget the nice touches such as the staff (at the 46th floor) let me learn how to make Chinese dumplings! Also, so many variety of delicious food, snacks and beverages were made available to me in anticipation of the Chinese New Year celebration and the great view of the fireworks show all around the city. It was definitely a fabulous experience!

There are so many examples of the staff members taking the time to do things "right", however, one example I will give is this - I traveled from Wuhan to Dalian via Shanghai two days before the Chinese New Year! In China, millions people traveled home for their family reunion during the Spring Festival. I arrived at the hotel (after 6 hours delay) without my luggage. My checked luggage was left behind somewhere in Pudong airport during the flight connection. At Cafe@6 for breakfast the next morning, the Dalian airport personnel called my mobile phone and he was speaking in Chinese which I do not understand. I was frantic knowing that he wanted to inform me the status of my luggage and I did not want him to hang up on me. Andy who worked at the cafe@6 that day, was immediately able to talk to the person (I must add that Andy is very fluent in English and Mandarin Chinese). Andy was happily assisting me from the time the airport people called to the time they delivered my luggage at the hotel concierge. In between, he made sure I was taken good care of while awaiting at Cafe@6. Why did i say all this? Andy does not work at the front desk nor at the hotel concierge, he happened to notice of my worries and helpless feeling. And completely oversaw the process of recovering my lost luggage - even though it was clearly not his job. He took the time to help me out and hunt down the status for me and helped me with the paperwork, rather than making me handling this situation with the airport personnel or with the hotel front desk myself. What you want to see in a hotel is a staff who make helping a guest the first priority rather than only doing what is within their "job responsibilities". If you want to stay in a luxury hotel with beautiful rooms and a friendly professional staff who will help you with anything you need during your stay - then this is the hotel to stay in Dalian.

Overall, everything about this hotel is how a hotel and a hotel...

The InterContinental Dalian is conveniently located for just about anything you'd like to do/find in Dalian. The rooms are spacious, well laid out and nicely furnished which lends well to a comfortable stay.

Though the house keeping staff seemed to pay close attention to the state of the bath room and bed area, I couldn't help wondering how they continuously missed the large balls of carpet fluff which lingered under the desk for most of my 2 week stay.

If you're a business traveler who requires a decent internet connection to complete your hotel requirements, I'm afraid the InterContinental will definitely let you down. I didn't dare run any sort of actual speed tests for fear of locking my connection down for an inordinate amount of time just to find out how bad the connection really was. Web conferences within the room were almost impossible. This was all using the wired connection.

To make things worse, the WiFi was terribly unreliable. In most instances it took two to three attempts just to log into their system because their access point seemed to occasionally lose connection with their server or router. In some instances emails and webpages on my smartphone would download rather quickly, but at other times I felt as if I were watching glass run.

The two restaurants, the Piccolo (Italian) and, the aptly named, The Chinese Restaurant both serve wonderful food and provide a warm, relaxing atmosphere. While staying at the hotel I was lucky enough to experience a Korean food festival at the InterContinental which was well worth the money.

Unfortunately, the kitchen which provides for the room service menu does not live up to such high standards. Specifically, the club sandwich I tried left me wondering where the chicken which should have been present in one half it went before it made it to my room. Additionally, unlike the sublime offering served in the Piccolo restaurant, the tiramisu which accompanied the meal was what one would expect from a cheap frozen dinner (maybe even less).

The staff were very friendly and seemed eager to help in all instances. Hotel relations was quick to ask me about my stay though I was short on time and unfortunately didn't get a chance to air most of what I've mentioned above.

All in all, though my review seems very negative, I had a memorable and comfortable stay in the InterContinental Dalian. If it weren't for not fulfilling my business needs, I'd definitely rate the...

I stayed at the Intercontinental Dalian for 4 nights in February 2014.

This is a pleasant, reasonably modern facility on the fringe of the downtown area. Rooms are very large and well appointed, with everything that you would expect at an Intercontinental property. Sleep quality was excellent.

This is not a positive review, though, and the IC Dalian falls down badly in a lot of areas.

The service is appalling….simply not up to standard. The level of English spoken by staff is the lowest I have encountered at an IHG property, and it colours every interaction. Worse is the obvious lack of training on all the ‘little things’ that matter when you stay in a hotel of this category; toiletries are not replaced, do not disturb signs routinely ignored, directions given by concierge were wrong, pool staff were nothing short of abusive (“You! No swimming cap! No cap no swim! Get out! Get out!”). I was very surprised to see a senior foreign manager standing and cracking jokes with the concierge while a group of guests were ignored behind them.

Overall, the staff appear unmotivated and untrained and the entire atmosphere is far too casual.

Wifi is so slow as to be utterly useless, with Outlook unable to send and receive emails at the low download speeds. For a five star business hotel, this is a major problem.

The fitness room is well equipped and should be a real sales point, but the machines are poorly maintained and even dangerous in some cases. After being thrown out of the pool for not having a swimming cap (there is no sign indicating that one is needed), I was astounded to see someone spit a huge ball of phlegm into the pool, right in front of the attendant. Apparently my near crew cut was a health hazard; spitting in the pool is fine.

Once again, my IC Platinum status was ignored, and the promised upgrade not delivered. The property was nowhere near full. This is not unique to Dalian, but is the promise of an upgrade to Platinum members is routinely ignored and should be just dropped from the ‘benefits’.

Overall, the IC Dalian is simply not good enough for the price. Major changes need to...