We stayed at the Radisson SAS Hotel Beijing for 6 nights on our travel to Beijing in March 2003. We stayed there from march 15th.

The hotel itself doesn’t have a great location. It is located next to ring 3 on the northeast of Beijing. But this was not really a big issue because there were always taxis outside the hotel and it was easy to get into the center of town. It cost about 20-30 RMB to take the taxi into Tiananmen square. It is also possible to take the subway to get around. First you have to walk for about 15 minutes to get to Liufang station. From here you can get to the loop line and then switch to Line 1.

The lobby of the hotel is standard. On the second floor you will find the breakfast restaurant but there is also another restaurant called ”the grill” if I’m not mistaken. We only tried out the breakfast place and it was nice. You have the standard selection of bread, fruit, cereal, bacon, sausages, eggs in different versions, warm dishes and so on. There was also some hot Chinese dishes if you prefer to start the day with that :-) And we got tea/coffee served at the table and you could also have different sorts of juices and milk.

In the lobby you will also find the business center where you can make copies or access the internet. It was not a very good internet connection and it was pretty expensive. If you need to access the internet I would recommend going out of the hotel, turn right into the first street and walk for about 50-100 meter. There is a small shopping mall and on the third floor was a big internet/game café where you could surf for 4 RMB pr hour.

In the lobby you can also book different tours and we used this option to go to the great wall and to go to the acrobatics show. Another great feature that we found in the lobby was the weather forecast. On a little piece of paper we found the forecast for the next two days and that helped us plan our activities.

We were a bit concered about how to get money where we came to China. But it turns out that there was an ATM at the hotel and and ATM at the store Carrefour near by. The Carrefour shop is only a couple of minutes away and we normally went here to buy water. You can also find Pizza Hut and KFC near by :-)

The room at the hotel was nice. It has tiles when you first walk in and the rest is a carpet. It has a minibar(we didn't use this much...a Coke was 26 RMB in the minibar and 1.60 RMB at the grocery store), a safe, a water boil with a selection of different tea-bags, a thing to iron your pants, a wardrobe with about 10 hangers, TV with cable TV (CNN, BBC, Star, Discovery and so on). There was a big red, comfortable, soft chair and also a chair in connection with the desk in the room. The bed was not all that big and it was really hard. So hard that I didn’t mind getting up early in the morning to start sightseeing :-) It seems like it is possible to use different electrical plugs because I could use the standard Norwegian round plugs. But there was also an option for flat pins. So I had no trouble charging my digital camera.

The bathroom was small but nice. It was tiled, it had a bathtub with the possibility of taking a shower (shower curtain protecting the floor from getting wet). By the sink we found little stuff like soap, body lotion, bath foam, shampoo, shower cap, sewing kit, dental kit (toothbrush and tooth paste) and a hairdryer. There is even a loudspeaker in the bath room so that you can listen to the stuff that is on the TV :-) The tap water is not drinkable so we went out to get water more or less every day. But we also got two ½ liter bottles from the hotel each day. It seems like the water is so ”bad” that it is even recommended that you don’t brush your teeth with it.

I enjoy my squash and I was delighted to find out that there is a workout place in connection with the hotel. There was 2 squash courts (you have to pay to use these- 45 RMB for ½ hour and 75 for 1 hour), an outdoor tennis court, a swimming pool and a gym. So I played squash a couple of times because this is where the Beijing squash ladder plays their matches.

On the day you check out it is possible to keep the room until 3 PM.

Pros
Nice rooms, squash courts,friendly and helpful staff

Cons
Not the best location

The Bottom Line
Nice hotel, good start for sightseeing in Beijing