Where to Stay?

Options

The options are Hotels, Air BnBs, Botique hotels, Serviced Apartments, Hostels and evidently Internet Gaming centers (for those on a severely limited budget and a QQ Id in hand, besides an ability to sleep anywhere).

The Hotels are many and the good thing is almost all of them allow reservation with no payments ahead of time and the option to cancel a day in advance of your arrival, whether you use Expedia, Orbitz, Booking.co, Trip.com, ctrip.com , travelocity.com or just about anything anywhere.

On the flip side it appears the Hotels have less than an obligation to keep the room you booked if they found a better deal. We had one of our bookings cancelled in this fashion, I've read many stories of relative horror where people arrived at the hotel to find it was fully booked. So be prepared for this, but it is less likely to happen than the fear it may warrant.

Air BnB's seem like a good budget option for larger families as many hotels say that rooms are good only for 2 or 3 and we had trouble finding a room with two double beds or queens for a party of four. With regard to AirBnB's, there  may be some language issues around "collecting your key" if there is no English Speaker in the chain of "key acquisition" , but having been in Beijing with Google Translate, i'm now less anxious of this than I was before I went there.

There are many serviced apartments around the city that may be good as well, I did not acquire enough knowledge to tell here. There are also a few very interesting boutique hotels within the Hutong's and some of these are lovely. We booked one of these initially and the reservation got swiped from us about 15 days before we arrived. This became more messy when they could not process our US Credit cards to acquire a smaller room in he same location as a backup. 

They at least emailed us when our room got swiped :) But do check this place, its interesting: Beijing 161

Hotel Ratings

Throw the hotel ratings to the bin, I found the overall ratings were not indicative of any quality to me. The reason may be the wide variety of users of these hotels and their cultural variance. 

I went deeper into review to pick ones from what appeared to be residents of US, England, Australia, New Zealand to get a review I was comfortable with. 

What I found was there are a lot of "5" star hotels of local brands that may be stretching the definition a little too much. 

Do they have Fire/Smoke Alarms?

One of the strange things I found were photos on ctrip.com of many of these "5" star hotels with broken toilets and rusted showers. Some of these may be posted at the instance of competitors, but take them in nevertheless if you are planning to book with a brand you know little of.

Some hotels are ancient buildings and ones I found uncomfortable staying at. 

Here are a few things to check:

• Do they have Fire/Smoke Alarms? I found most hotels including those charging hundreds of dollars a day did not have any.
• Do the front desk staff speak English? Google Translate is all good, but not everybody in my party was willing to go through the trouble of this.

Our Solution:

We decided to go with a global brand and with the hope that any deficiencies were not too obvious to make it too uncomfortable. In the end it was all good.  You have a choice of

Hilton, Peninsula, Novotel, Waldorf Astoria in the Wangfujing area which is well within a mile of the Forbidden City and therefore in the heart of old Beijing. 

Marriot, Holiday Inn , Crowne Plaza are in the area of Wangjing a suburb and swankier.

Another popular area is Chaoyang , North of the city and closer to the financial district and Olympic park and it has many of these brands as well. 

The 5-Stars there appear to be quite a bit lower priced than a comparable property at New York or much of the US.