Starway Jinkailai Hotel

How to describe my experience at the JinKaiLai?! It's the worst hotel I have ever been to! This was my first visit to Shenzhen and would be the starting point for a week's travelling around southern China with my girlfriend. I booked the Deluxe room on the eLong.com (Chinese hotel booking website), and paid more than 200 RMB. The hotel was located in a 22 storey high rise building but the hotel only occupies a single level on level 21, the rest of the building were offices, and the hotel had no dedicated lift. This meant getting up to level 21 took about 10 minutes with people getting in and out of the lift at all the levels. With this in mind when we first got to the room, the card key didn't work and we had to go down to get it sorted out and back up again, when we finally got in the room, the first thing you notice is the smell, it stinks of dampness and mould, there was mould on the ceiling, the duvet felt damp, the bathroom towels were old and shabby and the carpet had cigarette burn holes. This was just not up to standard and we demanded to change rooms, the hotel staff said the smell is because of the humid weather... but then wouldn't all hotels in tropical regions have this problem??? We moved to another room which was slightly better but still not to standard. We decided this was it and tried to get a full refund, but the staff said it was not possible because as we had already checked in and if we wanted to it would cost us. The staff called the so-called manager (he did not look professional at all) to deal with our problem but they still refused to give me a refund. Generally, JinKaiLai is a really doggy hotel, in the corridors, there were signs up saying prostitution is illegal, on one of the floors was a 'leisure centre', the type where you can get 'special' massages... We decided that we would just take the refund as we didn't even feel safe staying there and moved to the New Times Hotel just a few meters down the road, although more expensive it was a 100 times better, it was clean and modern, looked almost brand new and the hotel staff were excellent. To conclude, do not stay at the JinKaiLai!