Xishuangbanna Xiyu Hotel (Gaozhuang Xingguang Night Market Branch)

First of all, I always refrain myself from leaving negative comments about hotels, because people have different points of view, and usually I'm just happy and grateful to explore a new place and have a bed and a bathroom I can use. However,I don't like when the pictures of the hotel are misleading and if I pay a lot of money for something that's not worth it. That's why I decided to leave a comment. Let's start with all the amazing things - the location is very convenient, just a few minutes walking to the night market. The breakfast is delicious - Chinese style buffet with wonderful noodles- just gorgeous. The room had a projector and a decent amount of movie channels, it's perfect if you want to relax and snuggle with your partner or your kids. All in all, the problem was that staying in this hotel was a bit weird. First of all, there are all these signs about ************, *****, aids etc.in the room. That was the first thing that made us feel that there was something sketchy about this place. Secondly, the noise. If you want to come here to relax - don't. The elevator is SO loud that I could hear terrible noise every time it would go up and down, even having my noise blocking earplugs. Maybe that's an issue with the rooms close to the elevator, but I can't confirm. There is a construction just next to the hotel so there are drilling and banging sounds all day long. The staff is extremely loud, they yell for no reason (just talking on the phone or to each other), literally screaming so if I wanted to relax by the pool I had to listen to the loudest volume of music on my airpods, and I would still hear them. And then there is the pool...... My husband and I stayed in Xishuangbanna for a few days before we checked into this hotel and we were exploring and visiting all the places, so we wanted to spend our first day in this hotel next to the pool, sunbathing, relaxing, swimming. When we arrived at the pool, it was filthy, like nobody cleaned it in weeks. We asked them to clean it and they were so annoyed, it looked like they were using the equipment for the first time. There was a lot of yelling and even pushing and shoving amongst the men that were cleaning the pool. Finally, after more than two hours the pool was kind of clean. Basically, if you want to use the amenities, you need to tell someone in advance or it will ruin your day. The bed is really hard and you get two pancake-flat pillows (one for each person). In any other hotel I would've asked for another pillow, but I didn't want to bother - when I asked to get a shampoo at the front desk, the lady rolled her eyes at me so I guess that if the shampoo was too much, I can't imagine what would've happened if I asked for another pillow. However, there was another lady that was really nice and wanted to help us do some things we didn't really need help with like call a taxi, but nevertheless, the effort was nice. And finally let's talk about pictures vs. reality. We booked this room because of the soaking tub. The tub looks like I built it (I know nothing about building), it looks strange and dirty and finally we didn't even use it. I don't know which angles they use for taking the pictures of rooms, but our room definitely didn't resemble the pictures. We wanted a classy hotel for a romantic trip, and we paid quite a lot of money for the room, but finally we got a bizarre sketchy place that I wouldn't recommend to anyone except maybe some students or friends that don't really want to relax or enjoy the amenities.

It’s a bit run down compared to the photos but the staff are so friendly !