Holiday Inn Express Lhasa Potala Palace by IHG

The only good part was that they let us check out two days early and gave us a full refund when we had to change our itinerary because the Nepal border road was closed. The breakfast was really sad. Each day there was one “meat” option, just a few slivers of meat with vegetables, and piles of vegetables for the other dishes. The electric warmers didn’t work well, so the food was cold. Breakfast was the same dishes each day, with a boiled egg, plain steamed bun (man tou), and custard-filled steamed bun. They did have hot soy milk (dou jiang), which I like a lot. There was also a strange system where you had to pick up a breakfast voucher from reception and bring it to breakfast. The restaurant is next to reception, and they didn’t check room numbers, so I don’t know why they didn’t keep the vouchers in the restaurant. From the lobby through the hallways and into the rooms, the whole hotel reeked of cigarette smoke. It seemed soaked into the walls and floors. Smoke also came into the rooms under the doors and through the bathroom plumbing, and towels at the bottom of the doors didn’t help. It wasn’t just stale smoke, either. The old and fresh smoke both burned my nose. From the moment we walked in, the place felt like a cheap one-star motel.