Doubletree Resort By Hilton Lingshan

Stunning lakeside location. A atrium that will take your breath away. this is where the joy ends. the bar resembles the hotel out of the shining - a long neglected decline into shabbiness. the journey to the rooms was that of mould and ongoing attempts to keep the hotel going - awful alterations and poorly completed electrical additions. the room, while clean was very tired. breakfast was skipped on the advice of my Chinese team, who termed it awful.

We made reservations for this hotel through the Hilton website mid April. We reserved a beautiful two bedroom lake view suite and a king bed lake view suite. The resort is about a 55 minute drive from Wuxi airport without traffic. We pulled in around 11 pm and could not have been more excited about how beautiful the hotel looked. All lit up, signage in place. An employee who didn't speak any English came out to greet us, and we thought he had gone back inside to get a luggage cart. Instead he came out with another employee who could only say "closed". No further information, no suggestions. Hilton sent an email a week or two ago saying that they were no longer going to be managing this resort. What they neglected to do was say that it was closing, or to refund our payments, or to suggest any alternatives. We drove an hour back into Wuxi, saw a Crowne Plaza, and were grateful they had rooms. However, it's not the lakeside resort we had planned our vacation around. Truly disappointing.

Originally our friends and us booked a farm cottage around that area but due to power down we came to Hilton late afternoon asking if there are rooms for all of us. The receptionist was very efficient and nice to book us all in, not to mention the delicious cookies given to us for kids to enjoy. Rooms are nice and spacous, the bath tub is out next to balcony facing the lake (we got lake view rooms) and extremely nice. Kids enjoy taking a bath facing the lake view! There is a decent children playground which most hotels in China do not usually have. It comes with a video game room, a pretty big area with pool of balls, swinging cusions and walkaround structure with trampoline. Kids can spend at least an hour there no problem and enjoyed the facility. We did not have a chance to go to outdoor playground so I do not know how big is it. We saw the swimming pool even with kids pool and a slide which made us regret we did not pack any swim wear. But overall very good facilities for family vacation with kids. Dinner buffet was kind of disappointed, because they special steak they serve is overdone. They do serve unlimited sashimi on order, and pretty good in desserts. But my recommendation for their chef actually if they could come up with a kids food station with cheese pizza, spaghetti and chicken nuggets / fish fingers, that would reallly bring it up a knotch. Breakfast on the other hand is decent, with lots of choices in chinese and western, very good start for the day. One chef named Steven (in white chef unifrom) was so nice he speciallly made an omelete for us when we request, and did his round to follow up with different guests to ensure everybody get something they need. Really impressive. Overall very good family getaway, we do plan to go back since kids enjoy so much!