Wingate by Wyndham Urumqi Railway Station

The room was spacious enough for a two-seat sofa, the bed was made every day, and the hotel let me check out at 2 pm without me asking. We also got four bottles of drinks without requesting them. Breakfast had very good fruit, especially the rock melon. That said, the front desk staff seemed remarkably untrained. They didn’t tell me the Wi-Fi password, couldn’t identify the country on my passport or the Chinese customs date stamp, and didn’t know the visa-free arrangements for some countries. They kept our passports longer than usual and returned them to the room by robot. I thought that practice had gone away, so I was surprised it still happened here. There were spelling and naming oddities around the hotel too. The large Day Inns history photo in the lobby spells “Americ” wrong. I wondered if “By Wyndham” was also a spelling mistake. The towels say “Wing Lee Hotel” instead of “Wingate Hotel”, using a Hong Kong pronunciation rather than a Mainland one. The room Wi-Fi didn’t work in the breakfast area. The Haier washing machines were hard to use, and I’d expect them to break soon even though the hotel is new. The dryer failed to dry our clothes after two one-hour cycles. In two other Xinjiang hotels, two 10-minute cycles at 58 degrees did the job, and simply airing clothes in the room was faster here. There are two groups of lifts. The Wingate Hotel lifts by its lobby need a room card, but the other lifts, used for another hotel and businesses such as KTV or massage, open onto every Wingate floor without a room card. People coming from the bar or KTV sometimes brought strong alcohol and cigarette smells into the lift. The controls were also confusing: if you pressed the wrong direction and didn’t notice which way the lift was going, it could take you down to the businesses or up to the hotel rooms. The HCG tap in the room has sharp edges that could cause head or eye injuries while brushing your teeth. The HCG knot in the bath came off with one touch. Maybe the previous user didn’t know how to use it and broke it, but this is a very new hotel. Both felt like cases of form over function. The air conditioning stopped for an unknown reason. A technician lowered the temperature and got it running again, though I had already tried that myself and it only worked for a second each time. At breakfast there was a coffee maker but no coffee cups, only deep Japanese-style cups without handles for tea. The coffee came out steamed at 100 degrees, so it could burn your fingers unless you carried it to the table on a large dish. Knives, forks, and spoons were in very short supply. My wife had to stir her coffee with a chopstick. There was no toast, butter, or jam. They had plenty of ready-made sunny-side-up eggs, though really they were poached eggs. Soy sauce and white pepper were available. On my first day, the woman at the next table ate and drank nothing but a mountain of prawns with her hands and plastic gloves. At least she found something she liked, or material for good TikTok videos.