Holiday Inn Express Changjiang Suzhou

We were only here overnight with our tour group, after coming from Beijing and before continuing on toward Shanghai. For a short break in a long day of travel, it was fine for sleeping. The rooms are cramped, though, and you can hear people in other rooms talking, even snoring. I didn’t choose this hotel myself, and my view might be different if I had booked it with a longer stay in mind. It’s hard to judge a place when you arrive at night and only come in to sleep. I wouldn’t book it for several days, but an overnight stop is okay.

There’s a huge mall opposite the hotel with restaurants and a supermarket. Check-in went smoothly, the rooms are good, and breakfast was well organized.

Customer service was shocking, basically nonexistent, and the breakfast was below standard. The rooms smelled of mildew and were old and dirty. Cleaning was pitiful: the bathroom counter in my room was never wiped. The showers flooded the whole bathroom, and they didn’t fix that. Hallway noise came through the thin doors, and the air conditioning wouldn’t go below 25 during a very hot summer. There were lots of mosquitoes inside, too. At night, one side of the hotel faces a building with moving lights running up it. My colleague also had construction going on in the room above theirs at 7am, with no warning and no option to change rooms. When we complained about the rooms, they told us we were on “the nicest floor.” What a joke. Never stay here.

The rooms are small, but the hotel is nice and clean. Breakfast was very tasty, and there’s a large shopping center nearby.