Thin walls (noise issue). I had a problem with hallway voices, voices in the next room, as well as ambient noise (bass) from nearby nightclub. With the voices from within the building, it’s almost as if the design amplified them or made them echo louder, ditto for the noise of closing doors on the rooms in my hallway. A truly terrible design for a hotel.
Very little English spoken here, staff well meaning but it was hard even to check in, let alone deal with issues that came up. It shouldn’t be necessary to call the actual hotel manager in order to find someone with satisfactory English skills. Maybe I’m being unrealistic about hotels in provincial Chinese cities, though Suzhou is not exactly a small place.
I had unusual problems with key card not working (electricity kept shutting off every few minutes, including once when I was in the shower) and perhaps as a related problem, the hotel safe gave me a “fail” message and would not open when I had a lot of valuables inside. Try explaining all that with only a translation app!
I give hotel staff full credit for patiently trying to understand and help me out, but it was an unusually stressful and disappointing experience overall. This isn’t what international travelers/ Expedia users would expect. Noise problems aside, I’ve never encountered these issues before in years of international travel on several continents, including (on this trip) in other hotels in China.
