'China Accommodation' ↓

If you stay in Nanjing, a budget hotel is recommended, which is:

http://www.elong.net/hotels/details.aspx?m=&hotelid=21101011

It is at a prime site – in the Confucius Temple area. 168RMB per room. The room is clean and with fast internet connection. I chose the hotel for a friend based on hotel users’ positive review. My friend’s comment after using it? Positive, of course.

Opposite this budget hotel is a five-star “Mandarin Garden Hotel” where you can buy train tickets to anywhere in China for a service charge of 5RMB. Very convenient.

Another China hotel booking website I would like to recommend is Sinohotel. I’ve used their service, which is satisfactory to me.

Their English page has more user comment than elong, and for some hotels, they conduct checks and write their own comment. This is one great advantage over elong - more review in English. The price they offer and the range of the hotels they have are no different from those at elong, though.

As elong, once you fill out the online booking form, they will email you to acknowledge your booking and then email again to confirm the booking. Credit card is usually not needed for keeping the booking. You make payment when you arrive at the hotel.

However, you have to take note that China hotels request guests to pay deposit for their stay and the deposit will be returned when they check out. The deposit can be paid in the form of cash or credit card, usually a few hundred RMB.

I recommend two hotel booking sites. One is elong. This is a US listed company with powerful resources in China flight and hotel booking. I think it is the only company that offers online flight ticket booking in China. 

The hotel range is wide, and its booking service is quick. I made an online hotel booking, and they acknowledged receipt of request via email in two minutes and confirmed the booking through mobile phones in five minutes! I was impressed.

Besides good service, if you can read Chinese, go to their Chinese version and you will find lots of hotel users’ comments, very useful in helping you to identify a good hotel. Comments on some hotels are a few pages long. And the comment is aggregated into an overall rating.

It is a shame that the English hotel booking interface does not have user comment - well it is understandable. The site has much fewer English speaking users than Chinese users. It is another shame that the English page is not automatically shifted to the corresponding page in Chinese when you change the language option. You cannot therefore, just by one click, see the overall rating of the same hotel by Chinese users.

On elong, you can search hotels based on pricing. Once you push the pricing based search button, the cheapest hotels will come on the top. It is helpful for those on a tight budget.

Also, you don’t need a visa card to make reservation. Well, some hotels do require you to make the booking with visa cards if your checking in time is after 6pm and you want to be sure of a room during the public holiday like the Golden Week in May and October. But the visa cards they need usually are those issued in China. So avoid checking in after 6pm, or just take the risk of not having a room - the risk is minimal anyway.

The best way to rent an apartment for short-term in China is through internet. If you travel in China and want to stay in a city for a few days, you can seriously consider renting an apartment.First, you will have the benefit of living in a neighbourhood and hence observing the local life first-hand. Second, it is good value for money. The price you pay is cheaper than staying in a hotel but you can have all the comforts of living at home.

Take Hangzhou for instance. A clean, well-furnished apartment equipped with internet connection as shown in the photo above costs only 150 yuan per day.

Many major cities in China have a growing supply of such apartments, catering to the increasing demand in the domestic market. This has prompted the mushrooming of short-term rental websites, most of them in Chinese. So if you can read Chinese, this will be a great way for you to rent an apartment. There are some websites offering both Chinese and English versions, but the English version is much more brief.

This is a website I once used, which has a very comprehensive coverage of all the major cities in China. It has an English version, which has much less listing than the Chinese version, though.