New Century Grand Hotel Zhejiang Sanli

This is a hotel not often used by westerners but a great hotel never the less. Comfortable, clean, close to metro, in the non commercial part of the city with great food outlets around it. Great rooms, quiet and friendly staff. Great (Chinese mainly) breakfast but good variety. Considering how cheap taxi rides are in china I highly recommend it.

This hotel aspires to luxurious greatness but falls pretty far short. On the plus side, the rooms are spacious and well-furnished, the food is very good, and the staff are quite friendly. On the other hand, several important things don't work, and the staff, though acting solicitously, either don't try to fix them or simply can't. Most importantly, in both rooms I was in (more about that below), the air-conditioning did not work and they were often unpleasantly stuffy, even with the window open. When I reported this to the desk, they said they would fix it, but they didn't. They managed to turn the fan on, but not the AC, so the fan was basically blowing warm air. My last night there, the electricity failed utterly in my room, leaving it totally dark as I was packing. I reported this (not easily; more about this below) and they sent up someone who confirmed that, as I said, the electricity had failed. That person then called for an "engineer," who managed to get some but not all of the electrical features of the room working, so they asked me to move to another room, which I did. Aside from the fact that the AC also didn't work in this room, this second room was fine. Throughout, it wasn't easy to communicate problems or requests to the staff. Most of the time the people at the front desk or who answered the phone spoke no English or so little that they couldn't understand me. Eventually in each case, usually by calling one or more other people, they managed to understand what I was trying to tell them, but it was usually a trying process. Some of these discussions centered around wifi, which usually but not always works, and which is not trivial to access.

This was my favourite room out of the four on my Tour East trip. It helped that it was a corner room with a view overlooking the river and park where I watched the locals doing Tai Chi in the morning. A beautiful lobby and very nice breakfast as well.