Despite the convenient location, comfortable beds, and all-important quiet sleep we managed to get, the hotel's communication to arrange our pick up from the train station at night and what turned out to be a self-check-in was just dismal, clearly needing more training to ensure better organisation for future guests. The following constructive advice is to help the hotel improve and for (particularly foreign) guests to note:
1. Ask for guests' phone number and inform the driver well in advance of our arrival, instead of waiting till the very last minute to do so. We reached out to the hotel via WeChat the day before and rightfully received detailed instructions (in Chinese) to find the driver (the pick up service is actually outsourced to a separate company using 3 different vans), but once we found the van, the driver angrily insisted we call the hotel to identify us by confirming our phone number - we were not allowed to board without the hotel's confirmation, which should have been done directly with the driver well in advance of our arrival.
2. This hotel is not manned after hours, let alone 24 hours, so please make it known well beforehand that we will have to check in ourselves if arriving after hours, and provide clear instructions on how to do so instead of communicating them through the phone while guiding us using the security cameras. It is not the guests' responsibility to do your administrative work (to report ourselves to the authorities by scanning the police QR code and filling out our details) at 11 o'clock at night when we have an early morning train to catch the following day. The hotel should allow guests to enter the room as soon as possible upon arrival, not have us wait half an hour while they struggle with what was clearly their first time checking in foreign guests - worse still over the phone - insisting that this be done before we could enter our room.
3. If the hotel truly wants the patronage of foreign guests, they will have to prioritise our convenience and comfort over theirs by actually having someone check us in in-person. Remotely doing so to save costs is as absurd as expecting foreign guests to communicate our details over the phone, sending photos of ourselves, our passport details etc. via WeChat, and then finding our room card and the room by talking to someone over the phone in Chinese. At the very least, these requirements and instructions should be clearly produced and communicated beforehand so that nothing is improvised.
We hope the above experience helps improve what is a decent hotel providing good value for money.
