Jing An Shangri-La, West Shanghai

The location, design, large rooms and particularly the heating bathroom floors were my favorite features. I am a frequent business traveler and this used to be one of my favorite Shanghai-La properties in China, which makes this all the more disappointing - read on.

Despite the wonderful hardware and location, service was extremely poor this stay. I am not sure what happened since my last stay some time ago, but to illustrate: (A) The check-in took over 20 minutes with the front desk arguing with housekeeping on the phone and me just standing there after a long trip. May I suggest just letting the client sit down with a coffee or just tell me to get a bite to eat close by and come back later - I would wager your customers are not really interested in the details of why rooms were not ready or released on the system by 4:30pm. Also, you guys need to manage the queuing system for front desk - it’s chaos. (B) People put the DO NOT DISTURB light on because they do not want to be disturbed. Calling and waking me to ask WHY the DND light was on and asked me to leave and turn off the DND so the cleaning team can clean is just unexpected and not Shanghai-la. What is this, a shared dormitory with cleaners who only come in once a day between 12 and 4pm? (C) Out of the 4 day stay, tea bags were not replenished for 2 days, and creamer was not replenished on one of the days. Not a big problem, but shouldn’t there be some sort of a system? Do I need to next worry about whether the towels were replaced or the toilet scrubbed? Overall the staff feel like they were quite inexperienced but also on a tight leash; People seem more focused on getting their job done and assigning responsibilities rather than making the customer happy. This is a problem for a high end hotel. I rarely write reviews, but choose to do so this time because I have a very long history with the hotel. You have a problem at this property, please look into it!

The whole experience disappointed us. During the stay, the water pipe got problem and water was stopped for a while. Hotel didn’t inform us only after we called the service then only told yes it got problem. After a while, the water came, I went for showing. Who knows the water became fully yellow, and didn’t clean at all. I just washed hair and had to stop and step out. We asked for changing the room. However the hotel gave us a room with strong moldy smell (seems like long time nobody stayed). That time I had flu with headache. We asked to change another room which can be stayed and at least let me finish showing. However the manager Wang Bella said it is not their problem it is pipe problem and asked us to check the room one by one. Is it joking? No apologies, no solving the problem immediately but asked me with bath robe to wait for more than 20mins. Really ridiculous! Is it our request to much? Finally they agreed to upgrade to suite room. Another ridiculous thing happened when we checked out. They asked us to TOP UP the suite room fee. But when they upgraded they didn’t inform us that we need to pay, and overall is it our fault? We really feel disappointed. Is this a 5 star hotel servicing? Not at all: