Xian Yanta International Hotel — Hotel in Xi'an

Do not stay here. Check your itinerary now, and call your travel agent to make a change. Quote the brief rationale of, “ stuffy, smelly, air-conditioning may be non functioning, bad plumbing and poor staff service”. ||||The Xian Yanta International’s name alludes to a cosmopolitan hotel for international travellers. Perhaps if the name were different, such as “Irritatingly Quaint” or “Challenge” I would have less reason to comprehensively criticise the place.||||We were booked into the hotel by our travel agent via a large Chinese travel agency. We expected a locally run comfortable hotel a notch down from the big chain 5 stars. The hotel rack rates seemed quite steep, so they seemed to price themselves closer to 5 stars.||||The hotel is new and has an attractive façade and pleasant Chinese style interior with gold and stone highlights. It is within view of the Wild Goose Pagoda and its surrounding pleasant entertainment areas.||||On arrival the check in procedure was lengthy, up to 20 minutes. This is always quite irritating. But we were prepared to tolerate it as the hotel seemed fresh and new. The hotel staff asked for RMB 600 cash deposit for sundries and seemed to struggle with the concept of a credit card imprint, or even a charge and refund. We negotiated a RMB 200 deposit only to avoid sucking all our cash and needing to scurry to an ATM.||||We had booked a king bed and extra bed for a child. The extra bed seemed to cause some confusion at check in.||||We arrived at the room and the first impression was a combination of an odour of stale cigarette smoke, old urine, boiled cabbage and the sulphuric whiff of blocked pipes. This odour was common to all rooms we managed to sniff while walking the corridors. The plumbing smelt very potent and diffused through the whole room.||||The hot water taps offered tepid water at all times expect the morning. A hot shower was only possible during a couple of hours in the morning.||||We started up the air conditioner and found that it was asthmatic and weak. Overnight it only cooled the room to a claimed 24.6 degrees, which was actually 26.5 degrees on independent measurements. The room remained stuffy and uncomfortable compared to the outside air and the hallway air. The desk staff explained that in October their hotel turned off the air-conditioning compressor on all floors. They seemed unable to understand that this had the effect of making the room very uncomfortable. The staff explained that this was the case all over the city and seemed unable to comprehend that a traveller could make their own decision regarding room temperature by interacting with their air-conditioned control panel.||||We soon discovered that the window didn’t open fully. This had the effect of preventing the cool, but polluted night air passively cooling the room. We had explained that this was due to “safety reasons”. I soon came to suspect this may have been code for preventing people defenestrating themselves to escape the oppressive room atmosphere. ||||The room itself was pleasantly furnished with large bulky arm chairs and wooden boxes in dark stained timber and Chinese carvings. The addition of the extra child’s bed seemed to disturb the housekeeping staff. We were encouraged to place the bed right up against the King bed to obliterate all hope of one adult getting out of bed. Instead we insisted on moving some furniture around to create an obvious space beside the window for the extra bed. This involved a request to remove a large arm chair, which was effectively communicated as impossible by distressed staff expressions. Instead we managed to eject a wooden trunk from the room with the floor manager’s assistance.||||It took four goes for staff to deliver and dress the extra bed. A request for a pillow for the extra bed was again met with distressed expressions from house keepers who gestured for us to use a pillow from the main bed. I was getting the hang of negotiating in the hotel by this point, so gestured a pleading motion combined with a hands on side of head pillow motion. Some minutes later, by a minor miracle, an extra pillow arrived.||||At this point given the stuffy warm room and 1 hour interacting with hotel staff it was time for a shower. This was the most interesting placement of a shower I had seen in a hotel. Imagine if you will a fan shaped shower cubicle of a small but comfortable size, then place a 50 x 30 cm structural support beam in the middle of the shower cubicle, which essentially bisects the once reasonably sized cubicle. The result is a barely accessible shower for all but the under 5 foot and anorexic. Now I am all in support of the engineering necessities of hotel design but I would like to be less aware of the building structure and certainly not have it intrude into intimate personal hygiene moments. Oh, and furthermore the water was still luke warm and seemed to have an oily quality.||||After a challenging and somewhat unctuous shower I unpacked, only to find that the room did not have a wardrobe. This took some time to establish after searching the wooden walls and joinery like a psychotic man looking for a secret chamber or an escape from a bad tourist hotel.||||Furthermore, and there is really no amusing way of communicating this, the toilet flushed unreliably. Furthermore the staff ignore do not disturb signs in order to restock the minibar. The lifts are at times unreliable. The advertised gym on level 5 does not exist. The business centre is a small room with a cheap multifunction photocopier and little else.||||Breakfast was a good selection of fresh western and Chinese foods. The food was of a high quality. The greeting staff did not seem to know how to greet a guest beyond an interrogation for their room number. The tables were set randomly and staff seemed unsure of what it meant when one left their room key on the table to mark your table as taken. It was a nice environment with good food to listen to the Western tourists grizzle about their stuffy rooms and dubious plumbing.||||So, for the sake of this review we changed rooms. This took our beleaguered tour guide almost an hour to arrange as front desk staff and junior management stonewalled her. The duty manager eventually got involved and we were moved to a new room. In short, we had the stuffy, smelly hot room with tepid water and bewildered housekeeping staff. The improvements were that we had a shower without supporting architectural features and a wardrobe.||||Surprisingly, we declined to complete their guest satisfaction survey when we noted our options were excellent, moderate and fair with no negative options !||||Don’t risk it until the reviews are comprehensive and improved. For now do yourself a favour and avoid the place. ||||And, travel companies please take this one off the...

First and foremost one must be aware that there are several Atour hotels in Xi'an, and this is not the best located one. Some of the reviewers say that it's just a 5 min walk to the South wall, they were mistaking Atour Yanta for Atour Nanmen most probably. I was mistaken as well and ended up in the Yanta branch which is located at the highly busy filled with cars Yanta street. You have to take taxi's for everything as it's just a too far a walk for anywhere in the blazing heat and dust and air/car pollution. ||Secondly never book at booking.com in China. The staff had a difficult time finding the (english written) booking, plus the room I requested at booking.com turned out to be a different one than I wanted, because of their lousy description. When asked to change this I was caught up in a battle between the hotel manager, who thought this was booking.com's responsibility to solve this and booking.com itself who called once to tell us we didn't read the 'small letters' well. After a very bad talk booking.com said they would try to sort things out with the hotel. After that we never heard from the bloke again. Big big FAIL for booking.com! All other hotels I booked directly or via ctrip were totally satisfactory, with much better...

The Vienna is an older hotel which provides good value for its very reasonable price.   It has an unbeatable location, a 5 minute walk  to the Big Goose Pagoda and the Joy City Mall, where you can find lots of shopping, restaurants and touristy activities.   The hotel retains an old-world charm, with its out-dated furniture and facilities.   However, the breakfasts were limited and unsatisfactory---the same foods were offered almost daily, most of it was overcooked, and lukewarm.   The coffee was awful.  The biggest shortcoming was the smoke filled environment.   Many of the guests were smokers, and even though we were in a non-smoking room, the smoke from the other rooms filled the corridors, elevator, and general environment.    The staff, especially at the reception, were all very helpful and considerate, and they provided much warmth and good service which helped a lot to overcome the hotel's...