We were surprised that most 5 star hotels asked for high rates in December even though it was already in the cold winter. Ok, it was near Christmas but it is China where Christmas is not celebrated as the West! We were very pleased to find this hotel through Tripadvisor which had the min. 3 night stay package. The price was great with breakfast included, considering most hotels charge breakfast separately and at high price.

The hotel is beautiful and luxurous with high standard. The staff were professional. The room we stayed was spacious with a high ceiling and nicely decorated. We had a room with street view. TV has many international channels. The bed was fantastic, except the pillows were too high for me. The lighting was sufficient and nicely designed, unlike a lot of hotels we went to where you could hardly read anything. The bathroom is huge and has both a bath and a shower. There were two shower heads. The main one was not working properly and there was not much water coming out. The water of the second one was strong but the shower head kept tipping down from the grip. I hope the hotel check these things regularly and replace them. The water was not very hot (but warm enough) the first day but was hot the rest of days.

The breakfast was great, lots of choices. You can order your own fried eggs and noodles. There were Asian and western food, salad, fruit... The crabs and lamb curry were wonderful. The orange juice was fresh for the first day but the rest mornings it became concentrate or something else which was a pity.

The hotel is about one or two streets away from Wangfujing Street (walking distance), very close to the Forbidden City and the old city area, basically close to everywhere we wanted to visit downtown.

The biggest disappointment was the Portugese restaurant. It was nicely decorated and the service was good. But the food was average. We ordered the same type of fish fillet with one fried and one grilled. They were very hard and salty. We could not eat it.

Another small thing we would like to mention is we requested the hotel to book a restaurant for us through email before we got there because we could not make the booking ourselves. There was never an acknowledgement. It was possibly not part of their standard service? But at least they could say they could not do so. For a 5 star hotel, booking restaurant should not be too strange a request, should it?

But overall, we loved the hotel, and would definitely recommend it. While we stayed there we noticed that most of the guests were Chinese business people. We wonder if it was just the season or because it was a European style hotel while the tourists prefer to staying in a more exotic place... But in Europe, you won't be able to get such high quality accomodation unless you pay a much much higher price. So we hope the overseas visitors can see the value of this great hotel. I tried to search the background of this hotel but could not find out whether it is related to a big group. It would be of help if it is because it gives people confidence. Even our friends in Beijing never heard of this hotel. More promotion or advertisement is needed.