5 Days in Shanghai – Holiday Inn Express Shanghai Tourism Zone

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I stayed at the same property over the four nights in the city: the Holiday Inn Express Shanghai Tourism Zone. During the earlier months before the trip, there was scant information about this property — but more recently, the hotel has started showing up at the usual booking sites, e.g. Booking.com. The hotel is from the Holiday Inn Express group of hotels — we’d coincidentally stayed at a similar property here in Singapore in March this year — and my summary experience at this Shanghai stay is: mostly good, if a little rough around the edges.

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The hotel is quite near the recently opened Shanghai Disneyland, which is less than 6km away. The general area is about 30 minutes away from the city center, and vehicular traffic is sparse once you leave the city center itself. Actually, the whole area feels like it is still very much in development, with numerous retail blocks completed but tenants have yet to renovate their lots and move in. There’s a small convenience shop just a minute’s walk from the hotel entrance which offers all manner of necessities — toiletries, basic electronic items like charging cables and power banks, canned and bottled beverages, and light snacks, but at marked-up prices. As my luggage did not arrive alongside my arrival into Shanghai, I was able to get the most important necessities and toiletries from this store to tide me through the first day (the airport found the lost luggage and sent it over on the second day).

The property itself feels new, and in fact appears to be soft-launched, on account that so much of the surrounding area is not operating yet or is still under construction. The property comprises several guest blocks, none of which seem to be higher than four floors. The blocks are not sheltered overhead. But the distance between each is just a few meters, so rain shouldn’t be too much of a bother if you need to get from block to block.

The room I stayed in should be a Superior Room. It’s a fairly large room of 26m² with a king-sized bed and plenty of pillows alongside two quilts. The bed was a little on the soft side — my preference — and the floor is carpeted over parquet flooring, styled like a modern-day condo apartment. The room is also equipped with a TV console that integrates a small desk, plenty of power points that come with dual USB ports, a small 1.5 seater sofa, ironing board, water kettle, a small range of coffee and tea bags, safety deposit box, and a TV that looks like a 46″ LCD panel and comes equipped with a very large number of cable channels. There’s a small balcony ledge, but you can’t do much with it — I couldn’t get the balcony door to fully open anyway. The hotel’s rate is quite affordable, with the Superior Room type at about SGD60 including taxes.

There’s in-room WIFI that’s reasonably quick to connect — but the Great Firewall of China is a real clunker. Google, YouTube, Facebook and WhatsApp could not be accessed. I could live without the latter three as my mobile devices were on data roaming and I could get by, but the loss of Google News was a real problem as that’s my primary aggregated news source that I use frequently while on my laptop. As a side note, I was able to access our blog site just fine — I reckon this blog just isn’t important enough to be noticed and banned haha.

I thought soundproofing was solid for my room, though a colleague who stayed in a similar room on the same floor was able to hear noise from outside.

While the hotel is new, the quality of work in the room is symptomatic of the work done by contractors in general in our part of the world, going at least with what we got at the Minton: average to somewhat poor. I spotted numerous and large gaps between the wall and flooring that will pose problems in long-term maintenance (e.g. water can seep through).

The king sized bed was comfortable.
The toilet and standing shower stall. Towels were replaced everyday, and the shower stall had the usual trio of toiletry dispensers (shower foam, conditioner, shampoo). Oddly, there were no disposable shavers supplied.
Between blocks. Very European-styled.
A narrow street runs beside the hotel that can barely accommodate two lanes of traffic, one in either direction. The buses we traveled on everyday had to navigate the street gingerly.
The main block.
An intercontinental breakfast is served every morning. Nothing fantastic, but all the essentials are there: carbs, processed meat proteins, salads, (a small range of) local dim sum, juices, hot beverages, pastries and bread items.
The dining area. Breakfast started at 6AM. I came down for breakfast at that time every morning just to avoid the crowds.

So in all, the hotel is a decent 4-star property. Not nearly the best I’ve been at, of course, but the hotel is new, the bed is comfortable, and the area is very quiet (for those who want to avoid noise), if also a little out of the way.

Last post in the series next: trip reflections!