New Color Hotel Shanghai

An European style small hotel. Always clean, tidy and cosy. Not very spacious. A compact interior design. Clean and soft towels. Very comfortable bed. Easy to travel around by taxi and very close to subway station. Convenient to buy daily necessities and easy to reach shopping malls on the next street. The front desk and staff are always very helpful and friendly.

Over the last three years I have stayed at the Duxiana close to a total of 40 nights and stayed in multiple room types/floors so it is about time I wrote a review about it! The Duxiana Hotel is based on the concept of the DUX bed, and the hotel in Shanghai is actually owned by a Swedish owner, and there are several other Duxiana hotels in Sweden. When you walk into the reception of the Duxiana there is small sofa for guests and even smaller "bar" on the right, the left side is a lot of dead space taken up by advertising for Dux beds. All the staff have (with the exclusion of the manager, who is not always around) have quite limited English. They are always friendly, greet you with a smile and It normally works to get your point across eventually, but don't expect them to be be pulling out tourist maps or offering any kind of advice. The best thing about this hotel is, for me, really the beds. After a long, uncomfortable flight from Europe, it is great to know you have a good, clean bed to sleep off the travel. The rooms vary in size, but the standard rooms are a little poky, especially if one has a lot of luggage. Rooms facing the river offer a better view (701 is good) but in the winter are colder without the A/C turned on due to single glazing. The other side faces the road, but the hotel have double windows here to dampen the noise which also makes the rooms hold their warmth longer. The shower and toilet and literally glass and stone cubicles and offer little privacy making these rooms perhaps unsuitable if you are sharing with a friend or colleague. The floors and walls of the "bathroom area" are rustic-coloured looking stone, quite appealing personally. Other amenities include a somewhat cramped (depending on the room) writing desk, wired and wireless internet (wireless range was a little so-so at times), beautiful SONY flat screen TVs (that have USB to watch movies directly from portable flash disks). Shower pressure was fine, shower amenities supplied and refilled daily and cleaning level was very high, don't think I ever had one complaint with the level the rooms were cleaned to. The hotel is an efficient and reasonably priced laundry service; I didn't fill out any time-consuming forms that one normally has to do - just put the clothes in the bag and they charged it to my room at the end. Breakfast was a mixed bag. The first time I stayed at this hotel in 2013 it was a quiet period, so I was served breakfast to my room each morning. In this case, it was the same fried egg, toast and a bit of Chinese spicy roots... needless to say, I was sick of that after 10 days! The latest stay, however, the basement buffet breakfast was open with a reasonable selection of both western and Chinese cuisine, good orange juice, terrible coffee. There is a lovely lady on the staff whom I got to know (even though she couldn't speak a word of English), but when I came down for breakfast she would get a plate of food for me. The one issue I had with this hotel the last visit was I was put in a smoking room initially (my company normally books for non-smoking). This, combined with Shanghai's already bad air turned out to be causing me big problems my lungs. When my company called the hotel, the manager was extremely apologetic and offered me a larger, smoke-free room at the same rate. The location of the hotel is just a stone-throw from the office which is convenient i that sense, but for tourists it is perhaps a little off. Metro Line 11 (Longde road) is only a three minute walk. I can recommend this hotel for anyone wanting to stay in this area and/or wanting a comfortable sleep.

Despite the raves about the bed, it was way too soft and really only works for people who sleep on the side. The most unbearable part was the air conditioning which despite being on the lowest setting spews such hot air it's enough to perspire in winter. Also despite being on a non smoking floor, the central aircon continues to send smoke filled hot air into our room making it difficult for an asthmatic. Sleeping with the window open to get past the smoke problem was no option either because of noise from the traffic nearby.