The St. Regis Shanghai Jingan — Hotel in Shanghai

This hotel has gotten from bad to worse over the years. Definitely not worthy of a 5 star hotel or a St Regis. The rooms are either too hot or too cold, basically the thermostat is useless The refrigerator more often than not does not work and you have to ask for maintenance to fix it. The same decor has been in the hotel rooms as long as I can remember and I have been staying for 8+ years Recently this hotel updated the elevators and lobby elevator area. The design is hopelessly bad. It is difficult to see which elevator has arrived at the lobby, the buttons are so difficult to read. One of the elevators has buttons that are a mirror image between left side and right side of the elevator! This is in one of the elevators the others are “normal” So confusing. The breakfast area is and always has been awful. They move things around not sure if that is accidental or on purpose but it happens randomly and is very annoying. Recently this hotel sectioned off the main part of the lobby so t is some kind of snack area that you have to pay for, so hotel guests have no where to sit. This is absolutely ridiculous. I was chased away because I did not want to buy something to eat. I was just waiting for my room to be cleaned. This angered me enough to write this review. I am Ambassador status! Internet is and has been always slow or unstable. Check-in is always a slow process. They have all my information (name, passport, credit card on file etc etc) why does it always take more than 15 minutes to check me in? They are constantly tapping on the keyboard to enter something into the computer. I complain every time I check in but nothing ever changes. I stay at many other hotels and it never takes more than 5 minutes unless I request a room change or something like that. Every time I go to breakfast they always have to ask room number. I stay for weeks on end and yet they still cannot remember. I stay at the Grand Hyatt sometimes and they always remembered my name and room number within 3-4 days. I once reprimanded the staff saying I stay here so often, do I really need to tell you my room number every single day? After which they remembered until I left and when I returned 2 weeks later, same issue all over again .. never bothered to say anything at that point. I often leave bags at this hotel and other hotels and come back and they usually just send the bag to the room. Recently at this hotel, there were 3 separate occasions where they initially could not find my bags. I had only left them for 2-3 weeks. They did ultimately find the bags but this should never happen. Had to add another update here. What kind of 5 star hotel runs out of white bread? I have stayed in so many hotels and never have I encountered such poor management like this. Oh and the toaster oven doesn’t work half the time. It basically just heats up the bread (slowly) They killed the lounge for VIP guests in 2023. Used to be able to go in to the lounge in the evenings and get free drinks, now that is gone and as mentioned even the waiting area in the lobby is gone. Basically everything is pay and pay and get less and less.

The only good thing about this hotel is its location, nothing else. It is in an area where there are good restaurants to go to in the evening. They need to seriously change things here. I am trying to find some reasonable alternatives nearby to stay in the future. I absolutely do not...

I like this new hotel and I had an overall good stay at St Regis for 11 days. I especially want to highlight the great service I received from Lyn and Eunice at the Executive lounge. They remembered my name second time I went there, my preferred seats, as well as my preferences of tea and refreshment cookies. Thanks for doing an amazing job running this new property, and I am impressed that within less than a month from opening, St. Regis is providing first-tier hotel experience.

On the other hand, because St. Regis is still in the teething period, I have a few feedbacks on areas that could have been executed better:

Cleaning the whole room up before next guest check in. There was some stickiness on the desk when I first checked in, which should be from the previous guest. I understand that the desk is not cleaned up as often as other areas like the bed or the bathroom, but I would have enjoyed the stay more in a thoroughly cleaned room

Milder shampoo. I usually don’t bring travel pack shampoos with me when I travel back to APAC because hotels in Asian generally have very good shampoos. At this stay, I find my hair being extremely dry and fragile after using shampoo at St. Regis. I ended up buying a small pack of shampoo and conditioners that worked well and only cost less than 10 bucks. This can be a small investment for the hotel with great gain in guest experience

Informing guests of facilities and benefits upon checking in. My SPG membership comes with the benefit of happy hour at lounge. While St. Regis has not finished setting up happy hour at lounge, the service is provided instead in the bar. However, at checking in, I was only told that ‘the lounge does not have happy hour service yet’. Only at the 4th last night did I know that there is actually happy hour at the bar from another guest. To a wine lover, this is quite a disappointment.

Following up on incidents happened during the stay. I experienced a lift lock-up and falling incident during my stay. Two other guests staying in level 41 were also in the lift with me and my fiancé. After getting in the lift at ground floor and pressed buttons to our floors, the lift started to go up beyond level 3, and then suddenly fell to B1. We could not open the lift door. The other two 2 guests pressed Bell button and asked for help. We pressed out floor buttons again, and the lift went up and stopped at 41st floor first. Me and my fiancé got off the lift immediately. The management office took quick action and called for inspection soon after we reported the incident. And I appreciate such quick reactions very much. On the other hand, I did not hear back on inspection results or measures taken afterwards. The lift that went ‘crazy’ was still putting into work the following days. The incident is such a trauma and left me and my fiance upset every time taking the lifts afterwards. A few times we got the ‘crazy’ lift assigned to us, and we had to sent it to other floors without taking it, and called for...

Other than the spacious bathroom, everything else is mediocre for the price. We stayed in Shanghai two nights, one in the mandarin oriental, the second night in St Regis, thinking of getting different experiences, we loved the mandarin oriental but were so disappointed at St Regis, regretted switching from mandarin oriental🤣🤣. Here r our complaints of the St Regis hotel: Very unresponsive services, I don’t remember any other 5 star hotels where calls to the service department were unanswered, it happened three times out of 5 calls we made. Service was even worse at the affiliated restaurants and bars, we went to the “drawing room” (a bar like place for drinks , tea, desserts, and small dishes) before heading out for the airport, waited an average of 15 minutes for each little snack to be served, waited 40 minutes for a drink and it wasn’t even the drink we ordered🤣🤣🤣,,the lady did apologize saying that they don’t have the drink we ordered,, but we just wished they told us earlier,,, u know,,, not 45 minutes after. Plus they didn’t even have excuse, they weren’t even under staffed, the whole place was almost empty, there were only one other table with three customers sitting… and there are four of them just walking around….I finally had to run to the bar to rush them twice and had to rush to the register for the bill so we r not running late for our flight… the desserts were directly taken from the nearby Regis bakery and they charge a 20 yuan premium per item for just delivering to your table (that takes 15 minutes on average, we ordered two cakes one by one so a total of 30 minutes wasted)🤣, the cakes were tasteless and comes with western price tags. Thank god we reserved two hours for this “happy” hour break otherwise we would be fxxked…. Horrible English speaking: I called (in Chinese) to ask for an emergency feminine pad,,, of course I had to call a second and third time after every 30 minutes so they remember to bring it… while I was in shower, I asked my husband to call to remind them again,,, my husband doesn’t speak Chinese so he was like “hi, I am calling to check if you guys r deliverying the feminine pad to our room as you promised…” and the staff was like “oh I see, your WiFi password was incorrect?” My husband was like “wtf was that🤣”, and I had to get out of shower with soap all over to talk to them 😌. P.s. the staff at the mandarin oriental do not have perfect English communication skills neither but they are way more advanced in it. Unprofessional service: we booked with our platinum card and requested for late checkout up front when we checked in. The next morning the front desk called us to ask if we want to extend our stay….my husband was just so tired of them he doesn’t even want to talk to them… the Mandarin oriental hotel was so much more professional in the sense that we don’t need to get upset about these little details…

At check out, my husband was so excited to go to the airport so he doesn’t need to talk to the St Regis people...