Could have been better...

- it's a nice hotel and some of the staff were helpful, but that didn't compensate for the problems we had and the location outside the city walls. we ordered a double room and breakfast buffets both nights of our stay, but the staff at reception said they hadn't recieved this information. it wasn't until our second day, after we had stayed a night in a twin and missed breakfast, we brought down our receipt and had them call up our booking agent, who confirmed our reservations. they were then good enough to provide us with a small breakfast after we had missed the buffet, but we didn't get moved to a double until that night. we got a call up to our room and were told someone would be up in five minutes to show us to our new room. so we had to scramble to pack our things while the hotel staff waited outside to show us the way. the problems we had were clearly more to do with communication between our booking site (hotelsclick.com) and the hotel, but our first night the staff tried to brush off our problems instead of making a two minute phone call to our agent. the other issue was the location - in the summer months xi'an gets quite busy. bussing to locations around the city was fine, if a bit long, but trying to get taxis in the evening was a real hassle, especially since half of them didn't seem to know the location of the hotel. the directions card provided by the hotel was next to useless, i'm not sure if the writing was too small? we had more luck writing down the name of the hotel in chinese characters on a post-it. so, overall, the rooms were nice and the buffet was good, but the hassle of simply trying to get our reservations right was a pain - not something fun to deal with on holiday.

Chiudi