Club Med Yabuli — Hotel in Harbin

First CM trip 8N at CM Yabuli in the early-mid December of 2023. ||Cons:|1. The kids club when we arrived, was insanely shorthanded. |2. Yabuli is really NOT the place to take your introductory course to snow sports. A min of 3 to 4 layers vs Niseko. Ice hurts, pad up - there's little snow.||Kids club was NOT set up to deal with both adults or children who did not have an interest towards snow sports!!! There was nothing for us to do except sit in the bar or room, as even the restaurants were shuttered in between the short dining hours of 2 hr each session.|3. Gear and equipment are outsourced to a 3rd party in the public ski hall. You have go there the night before 8pm to rent everything and pile them into your own locker. You're expected to store your own equipment daily without cleaning, at a rate of 600RM a day for boots, helmet and skis. This pricing, is ridiculous and on par with Niseko, where a ski in-out hotel would clean, dry, store your gear daily with roughly the same price. And if you rent gear for the kids, you have to personally carry all the gear yourself to thr kids club in the next building, and also return them yourselves. It does not seem like a big deal but when you are unused to the climate and to snow equipment, it is extremely tiresome and troublesome, and worse to pay a 1st World price and receive 3rd World gear and service.||4. Only the 1st level children magic carpet is private for CM Yabuli. Expect enormous crowd trying to push their way to the 2nd level magic carpet. /CM & Sun MT Instructors dress alike. Plenty of locals smoking on the magic carpet, ignoring children, taking selfies being a danger to others, trying to steal your snow equipment "because they want to". Our children's coach got into a screaming match with a local who forcibly tried taking his gear & hurled vulgarities.||5. CM yabuli rooms are warm, well heated and large. Appreciated the humidifier in each room. However the rooms are old and require some maintenance. Our first room had a cracked tile floor with sharp edges poking out and they suggested placing a carpet over it. While that worked as a temporary fix, we would have appreciated that they arranged to change the room since it was a 8N stay instead of us asking for me and we had small children.||6. Meal times were strictly on 6 to 8am, 12 to 2pm, 6 to 8pm so there would be a HUGE crush. For those who did not participate in the snow sports as well as those who had a day ourx we were all forced to rush for these timings. This crush would well be avoided if the timing was better spaced out especially if you considered that there was only restaurant in operation, as the hot pot restaurant was only open for dinner. It made things very stressful ||7. The clinic consists of a nurse. Plse don't delude yourself that in case of a medical emergency that there is an attending doctor. There are NO qualified doctors of any sort on site. There are also NO pharmacies to buy OTC medications. Come prepared and fully travel insurance-d up. I am particular about this as one must note the nearest hospital is 3h away by car.||Pros|1. The buffet was great everyday -- your kids will have plenty of pizza, pasta, rice, noodles, bread, burgers and hotdogs. There is a pleasant mix of Eastern and Western options for adults as well. Wine and beer are free pouring. Go for Mudan hotpot. The chefs were super accommodating and friendly, always offering you a 2nd helping or asking if everything was to your liking.|2. The staff were all incredible - so energetic even after a long day and still performing at night and chatting with guests. They were all so welcoming and friendly and you could tell they really do love their job with a passion.|Thank you Cupi, from Kids Club, you were calm and amazing despite the daily chaos and surrounded by the crying children.|Also kudos to all the ski and snowboard instructors -- on some days beginners classes were like 42 to 3 instructors. They did their best and were patient. However due to language barriers, we especially would like to give credit to the English speaking instructors which were in high demand --|Thank you Chris, Emmett, Jimmy, Vincent, Martin and special call out to Ruby as well, who was the sweetest and most helpful girl. These instructors had so so so much patience with our children, always encouraging, always helpful and always chirpy despite the tantrums and laziness due to extreme drop in temperature. They really looked out for the kids, checking they were warm enough, and rushing from one child to another making sure everyone was uninjured after a fall, arranging for them to take the gondola to the top for snowball fights where the crowd thinned off and had some snow at least to enjoy themselves even though they were not good enough to advance but at least they got th see the beauty of Yabuli - especially Emmett and Chris, a HUGE thank you, the kids had a great time.|The coaches were all super patient despite the inclement weather which was literally blowing all the snow ( both really and artifical) off the mountain which made any kind of learning near impossible.||Ruby is the best!!! She was always on the go, although she was specifically from the Ski department, I've seen her many times in the morning sending the kids who were late to their instructors, shivering as she was not dressed to actually head outside. She would wait there with the children until their instructors back tracked to pick up the latecomers. She is also effectively bilingual, and she made communication between the local instructors as well as foreign instructors a breeze for us. We really appreciated her warmth, understanding and her attitude of "going above and beyond" to take on questions and difficulties we had and attend to them on her own initiative vs some of the "not my department we can't help you" attitude we received at the ski hall and the kids club. She truly saved our trip from falling to ruin.||3. The nightly entertainment was great! Every show we watched was family appropriate, funny and very entertaining. Hi carol & ahbu!||4. Longer tea break for shower and relax at Forest pls|5. Front desk manager Grace -- efficient and nice. Whatever issues that we encountered and had the opportunity to bring up to her, she would speedily address and resolve, thank you.|6. Ismail at F&B - friendly, always around at both restaurants and being very helpful and quick to address any dietary restrictions. ||CM Yabuli has a great crew and staff -- passionate & vibrant. Their faults are mostly hardware and I do not feel that they were ready for an international market or an English speaking one. A larger number of English speaking instructors will help, also a greater variety of good quality gear we can purchase in the CM store. We were paying USD40 for unsuitable & unbranded summer balaclavas. I understand we were are in a tourist trap, but paying x2 what we pay for in Niseko for a good quality product is simply unacceptable. Profit yes, but profiteering if you would like us to return. We would totally return for the quality of the staff/crew because they were really the highlight of our trip, warm, welcoming, fun. CM Yabuli needs to put more thought put into planning the schedules and timetables for their kids club, meal times, the rental system by a 3rd party, better inventory sold & (a lot of time is wasted when parents were not given advice -on a piece of paper perhaps?- on how their children should be...

We had 3 rounds of snow during our stay in Club Med Yabuli. The snow is much more than last year. As expected the hospitality of the GOs are fantastic. They kept us busy and entertained throughout the day. We enjoyed the company of the GOs during lunch and dinner.

Most of the activities are focus on skiing. Ski lessons are group lessons conducted on the slopes. As the skill level gets higher there a fewer people on the group. In our opinion, a good level to start Is Club 1A if one has done some skiing and had not have any formal ski lessons.

We stayed for 7 days and had local and international ski instructors from Club Med and the world leading école duski français ESF skill school to take us to the ski slopes. They provided valuable advices and demonstration ski techniques. The Australian ski instructor Mike is very patient with us especially on the Hockey stop lessons. Strongly recommend to those who want to learn how to stop on the ski slope. We also had lessons from ESF Swiss instructor which is very knowledgeable and great skill. He helped us on our short turns. Our 9 nine years old was in the Kids club and had very good lessons from Nina and Leo. Carl is especially good at teaching carving.

Our rooms are spacious and facing the ski slopes. The rooms are kept clean and well maintained. The food in the buffet is good but could have more variety. The waitresses are very fast in clearing the unused plates and utensils. The grill lamb rack and grilled fish are very good. We particularly like the Chocolate Pudding,...

Very bad experience with kids club and appalling after sale service. We were planning a Club Med holiday this Easter but given our experience we will avoid them in the future. |Kids club only had one person looking after more than 8 children. I had to help the GO entertain our son and other children (!) for 30min before heading out for my lessons. We ended up having to come back and pick them up everyday and missed our afternoon classes to look after our son.||Another couple that we know simply pulled their child out of the Kids club.|Local staff confirmed to us they would keep a record to be able to claim costs back. They ended up not confirming this to HQ and saying the club was always fully staffed.|Finally, their after sale service was incompetent. We asked for reimbursement of half of the kids club costs (around USD200), after 2 months of back and forth, where we had to repeatedly re-explain in detail our experience because they wouldn’t engage on the points, the ‘Travel Experience Designer Supervisor’ told us they were only willing to make a ‘goodwill’ repayment of around 80USD. |Even more disappointing when we know that the other couple who took their child out right away from the kids club were reimbursed the full amount…|You think that ensuring a positive customer experience would be worth more than the small amount we were requesting (around USD200 / 5% of the overall...