We came to Beijing with no expectations. Our original reservation with a hotel a few blocks away fell through--apparently we were not in their database--so we left our luggage with the concierge and walked through the neighborhood to find a new hotel. The Celebrity International Grand Hotel seemed what we needed. We looked at a suite with a small living room and a master bedroom for about $200 a night and took it.

The positives: excellent concierge. Always helpful and on top of it. Helped us choose places to visit, set up sightseeing, and set up reservations at restaurants where the language was Chinese-only. We found the command of English of the staff to be adequate. No complaints on our part. If anything, we realized that we were the unprepared ugly Westerners who didn't bother to learn a word of Chinese before we entered the country. But in three days we learned enough to at least communicate our general meaning. Learn a few basic words and phrases like hello, goodbye, what does this mean, how do you say..., take me to..., etc., and you'll be fine. Most of the Chinese people we met were eager to understand us and had lots of patience, in and out of the hotel.

We ate no Western food for 7 days so we have no recommendations on the hotel's food (which seemed to be advertised as mostly Western), but all the Chinese restaurants we went to were quite good.. several were there in the neighborhood. We liked the clothing store Wayne's down the street and there's a good art museum nearby.

The bed was very comfortable--very firm with high quality linens. We were on the 11th floor so we heard little outside noise. The TVs had access to some familiar cable channels: CNN (from Australia), CNBC, etc.

The negatives: only one which wasn't too much of a bother. The hallways were musty smelling from smoke. China is not smoke free. People smoke everywhere: restaurants, elevators, lobby's, hallways. We didn't like it but we got used to it.

I stayed at the Celebrity International Grand in Beijing on business in Beijing in April. A few quick thoughts:

- although the staff were generally helpful, I would estimate that only about 15% of them were able to speak English in a meaningful way. The rest of the time, a simple request like "where is the toilet" would be met with a blank gaze and a conference with three or four staff trying to figure out what you were saying.

- the hotel offers free broadband internet access but it dropped in and out continually, making it essentially impossible to VPN in to work. That said, internet access seemed generally unreliable everywhere we went in China, even in the grander western hotels, so perhaps that's just a fact of life in China.

- The rooms and hallways had an odd smell. I think it was a stale smoke smell, but I'm not sure. It was quite an unpleasant smell each time I came into the room but I got used to it after the first 15 minutes of being in there each day.

- The VW sedan hotel car that came to pick us up from the airport had a really small boot that was already half full of other assorted hotel stuff, so they had to play luggage tetris for about 10 mins in the hotel carpark. On the way back to the airport (after we'd accumulated a couple of conference backpacks and stuffed them full of the cheap clothes we'd bought at the markets) they didn't have enough room in the car's small boot so they had to order a taxi to carry the additional luggage. It wasn't actually that much luggage... it would have fit in the boot of a standard Sydney cab or Mercedes limo you might get at hotels in other parts of the world.

- The room service was a bit odd. I ordered a spaghetti bolognese on the first night and got an extremely small bowl of pasta with an -extremely- small dollop of meat sauce on top -- almost like a garnish.

- Like most five star hotels in countries where the water is unsanitary, the hotel supplies free bottled water. However in the case of this hotel, only two half-sized (200ml) bottles of water were supplied each day -- enough for brushing your teeth, but not enough for drinking, or, in my case, washing my contact lenses. I asked for extra water and was told by room service that only two bottles a day could be supplied, which was annoying. For a few days I bought the Evian at 40RMB (around $AUD6 a bottle) but then I found a supermarket reasonably nearby and was able to buy some big bottles cheaply and bring them back. This annoyed me, because when I stayed at the Conrad Hilton in Bangkok recently they were more than happy to supply unlimited bottles.

- Despite the company that booked the room for me supplying a credit card number for an extra day and a half's stay by phone AND fax, the hotel lost the details and wanted me to pay for them on my own card. Because of the language difficulty, this was essentially a non-negotiation and we just had to pay up.

The language barrier certainly wasn't a problem at other five star hotels I visited while I was in Beijing, such as Crowne Plaza, where all the staff spoke at least functional but mostly excellent English. I think for an "international grand hotel", it's reasonable to expect more of the staff than not to be able to speak English.

To summarise, I think the rooms need a really good vacuuming or carpet cleaning and the curtains to be washed to get rid of the unpleasant stale smoke smell, and staff need to be given more English language training before I would be prepared to recommend the Celebrity International Grand Hotel to other travellers.