allystum

I had posted before but now that we are getting closer to departure- its time for some serious planning and some serious help! ALL RESPONSES ARE GREATLY APPRECIATED!

Some background- My husband and I have planned a trip to Asia for August 2 - August 22
We are going to be in Japan August 2 - August 9
On a cruise from August 9 - August 14
And, in China from August 14 - August 22.

Our itinerary so far for China is as follows:
Everything can be changed so please let me knwo if you have other ideas!

Cruise leaves us in Tianjin on August 14, so we are going to go straight to Beijing from August 14 - August 18 -- Beijing (Peninsula or St Regis???)
August 18 - August 19 -- Xian (What upscale-ish hotel in a central location is recommended?)
August 19 - August 22 -- Shanghai (Pudong Shangri La or Le Royal Meridian??)


My questions are:
Can anyone briefly plan out my days in Beijing and Shanghai. Since I am in each city for a few days I am looking to get a general overview of must see sights so when/if I come back to visit, I will be able to determine what I want to spend more time on.
I have no idea what I should be seeing, the distance between places, etc.

I am planning on flying from Beijing to Xian on the 18th in morning, seeing the Terracotta Warriors in Xian, and then flying to Shanghai on the 19th in the afternoon.
Does this make sense? Should I plan this any other way?


I am so sorry that I have so many questions but I really want to make the most and best of this trip and know that people on these forums have helped me so much in the past!

Thank you in advance for all your help and guidance!

hopeless_nomad

The silence here says a lot. Specifically it says that you should do your own research (this is a travel site after all) and plan your own trip, rather than ask a forum of strangers to do it for you. That, or you need to hire a travel agent. Just sayin'.

Iowa_Redhead

You need to get a guidebook to help plan your days. Many guidebooks suggest daily itineraries or at least lay things out by area of the city. Figure out what is of interest to you and go from there. One trick I use is reading the trip reports and planned itineraries of other people to come up with my own plan. You're more likely to get responses if you come up with your own plan and then ask for tweaks or ideas than you are to just ask someone to do it for you.

For hotels, look on tripadvisor.com for reviews of each specific hotel. Use the search function here to find any reviews of those hotels.


I know this wasn't the answer you were hoping for, sorry.

PeterN_H

> For hotels, look on tripadvisor.com for reviews of each specific hotel. Use the search function here to find any reviews of those hotels.

Treat what you read there with extreme caution as there is a great deal of thinly disguised self-promotion by commercial entities, and very much of the remainder is comment by individuals on their first experience of travel in China with little real understanding of what's happening, and no experience of any alternative to their own choices, many of whom slip easily from 'I did this (and only this)' to 'I did this and it was the best way' because it's what they want to believe.

Disguised self-promotion by commercial entities leads to misguidance, which leads many to make the same selection, which leads them to report on the same place, which leads to a further appearance that that is the right choice through sheer volume of comment, when there's something newer, cleaner, cheaper right next door.

This may well be true for all destinations, but for China in particular, where there's massive and rapid development in all price ranges within the hotel industry, what's needed is advice on criteria for making choices and on booking those choices rather than particular recommendations. There's quite a lot of that here under other threads.

Your first stop for individual hotel selections should be sources where a statistically significant selection of hotels in your budget range have been independently *compared* with each other by one critic, actively investigated, and reviewed in a consistent manner using the same criteria, rather than casually sketched by random strangers whose tastes and general experience are unknown to you. Much of what it said on it (as everywhere else on the Internet, or as with public discourse in general, some might argue) is utter nonsense. Trip Advisor is, for the most part, a mixture of the blind leading the blind and the commercially sighted leading everyone astray, and perhaps should only be looked at when other sources have led you to consider particular properties.

sylvia3

Nonsense. Tripadvisor is full of real-person reviews by those who travel quite a bit (or they would not bother posting such reviews on such sites).
It is a very good resource to add to all the others you should be pursuing (and self-promotion by a self-interested party is often laughably easy to discern).

thursdaysd

Not entirely nonsense. A lot depends on the country. I've found it fairly reliable for parts of Italy and France, but it should be avoided at all costs for Marrakech. One problem is that while a hotel owner is allowed to respond to a negative review, the OP is not allowed to respond to the owner, even when s/he is flat out lying.

PeterN_H

> Tripadvisor is full of real-person reviews by those who travel quite a bit

Even if the site does see postings from people who travel widely, the arguments, as usual, go unaddressed.

Nor, as is so often demonstrated, does being a frequent traveller prevent someone from being entirely clueless, recommending third-rate overpriced hotels through having experience of no others, and so on. Nor (but this is only to repeat some of the points already made) will even the most frequent traveller have actively sampled a significant number of hotels, transport methods, tour/independent options, in any one town, nor usually have mastered either culture or language to any degree sufficient to make informed comparisons.

The hoodwinked by definition don't know they've been hoodwinked, and will often remain in denial even when the hoodwinking has been pointed out. In terms of reliable information, beyond simply reading about one person's feelings about one option on a single visit (and hoping there's no hidden agenda), the whole project is farcical, very badly edited and moderated, valuing volume of material and numbers of clicks above all else. It's a last resort.

sylvia3

Have to disagree; there are always caveats, even with major tour book producers that can be out of date with ratings. However, I've used Tripadvisor for years, and found it extremely helpful, for several continents and many countries. ARe there bad reviews, hostile reviews, fake reviews? Sure; it's a public clearing house, and tens of thousands participate.

"Nor...will even the most frequent traveller have actively sampled a significant number of hotels...sufficient to make informed comparisons."

And THAT is why the intelligent traveler takes into account ALL the sources available, and from those sources, makes his or her OWN decisions after making (their OWN) comparisons. Trusting to one person's opinion, however well meant or experienced, is as foolish as making reservations on the basis of animal entrails read. It's a big world, and there are lots of choices; smart people try to use all resources available.

hopeless_nomad

I've pretty much stopped using TripAdvisor and have switched to searching TravelPod for reviews of tours, hotels and restaurants.

My assumption is the people on TravelPod.com are keeping blogs and writing lengthy reviews and summaries of their travel experiences, compared to TripAdvisor where people write just 3 or 4 lines. Another assumption I make is fake reviewers are not likely to write a full blog just to embed a rave review for their own restaurant or hotel.

(Peter, that is how I came to the prices for the excursions in Guilin. Not by looking at forums such as this, or looking at travel agent prices.)

Other ways travelers can check up on places is by doing a search on Flickr.com to see real photos. This is particularly helpful with restaurants and also hotel rooms.

We're pretty far from the original topic, so I'll stop here.

Iowa_Redhead

Thanks for the travelpod idea hopeless_nomad, I've never heard of that site before.

I've been using TripAdvisor recently, but I ignore the reviews that are a few lines of poorly written, glowing praise by new posters. When a hotel has been reviewed 1,000+ times and has a high overall rating I give it a lot more credit than a hotel that has been reviewed less than 20 times with the same rating.

I love your idea of searching on Flickr. I do a lot of google image searches, but that usually doesn't pull up Flickr photos within the top pages.

Your ideas should really help the OP plan her trip and come up with ideas that she can clarify here once she has a loose plan. Is it off topic or did you simply bring the topic full circle back to the OP?

hopeless_nomad

We have *totally* brought this thread full circle!

I'll add that Flickr is great for checking up on hotels and restaurant dishes, but try to resist looking up actual sites because it will ruin the surprise of seeing it in person...a lesson learned by me earlier this year.

Nutella

Great advice Nomad. I also search the blogs for narratives of experiences in hotels, restaurants, etc. And when you can find what you're looking for, youtube is excellent for getting a true feel of a place. I do use all this together with tripadvisor - like Iowa I tend to give more credence to the 3 and 4 circle reviews rather than the glowing 5 circles. Have to say that more and more, IMHO, online reviews, blogs and forum contributions render the idea of relying on guidebook recommendations obsolete.

PeterN_H

> (Peter, that is how I came to the prices for the excursions in Guilin. Not by looking at forums such as this, or looking at travel agent prices.)

This is following up on the discussion on another thread?

I'd agree that (for now) that helps sift out some of the more obvious commercial material, but it still doesn't address the other points on finding reliable price guidance on-line, at least for destinations like China, and is unlikely to provide consensus on real prices, as opposed to prices conveniently obtained. Once again, these are reliable sources for 'What happened to me' accounts, but not 'what's best', nor 'there was a cheaper option next door', nor 'I was completely hoodwinked.' For China, without long experience and without Mandarin, there's next-to-no chance of getting to the bottom of things.

Unfortunately it's only a matter of time, if it becomes generally and publicly agreed that such resources are more reliable than Trip Advisor (hardly a difficult case to make), before somebody writes a glowing account of taking a certain route on which their restaurant or guest house happens to sit. If I were the proprietor of a backpacker-targeting Tiger Leaping Gorge guest house I might well be tempted to write a detailed account of the wonders of the trek, for instance, embedding strong recommendation for my own property.

> Have to say that more and more, IMHO, online reviews, blogs and forum contributions render the idea of relying on guidebook recommendations obsolete.

If we're confining ourselves here to thinking about hotel and restaurant reviews then there's never any harm at looking for second opinions, but even then finding truly detailed research, in which all the options have been tried and compared, is almost unheard of. A great deal of arrant nonsense and complete falsehoods are published on forums not only by those who would mislead you for their own aims, but with the best will in the world by those who simply don't know what happened to them. When it comes to wider technical knowledge, sound historical and cultural background, detailed guidance to individual sites, you're on very weak ground indeed.

Unfortunately most guide books to China are also weak in some way or other, but when it comes to reviews, in theory in the better guide books at least you should have a single voice who has experienced very many options, and whose material has been peer-reviewed, and written by people with extensive knowledge and experience of the destination and who speak the local language (if they don't have both, then for China you shouldn't be buying their guide--the biographies should be the first starting point in selecting a China guide book).

The accuracy of remarks on English-speaking destinations is far easier to assess cold than remarks on culturally and linguistically alien destinations such as China, when really very few visitors indeed really know, or have any way of finding out, what's going on. In every case those who comment on-line have guide books in their pockets, so it's not as if there's any real replacement going on. One resource feeds on the other, and the same reinforcement process takes place as when every backpacker in China had LP China in their pockets. The book said this hostel was the best choice, so everyone went there, found lots of people there (all with the same guide), so assumed that it was the best choice, and would argue that it was the best choice, without having actually been anywhere else (and right nearby, in almost every case, there would be another place that was newer, cleaner, cheaper, and friendlier. But because people just followed the book, they would never find this.) The hostel in question would thrive on the traffic, and would gradually raise rates, or pull tricks like keeping the bed rates reasonably low, but overcharging for absolutely everything else (train tickets, day tours, Internet access, etc.) This remains the business model of key recommended hostels in Beijing today.

With guide books it's a bit like choosing to read the film critic who has been proved to like the same sort of films that you do, or whose prose you find delightful and reviews informative, even if you may then choose not to make the same selections. The person you read reviews films for a living, sees very many films indeed, writes from wide experience, and knows he has editors and competitors looking over his shoulder. For now, except where some companies have put guidebook contents on-line, the Internet is offering precious little of this kind of material.

One reason is that as yet no one's come up with a business model beyond one that lets absolutely anybody at all post opinions, however misled, and entirely without quality control, entirely for free, and that feasts off commissions from dubious booking options and advertising sales. In terms of paid-for quality comprehensive critical review that consistently includes key facts, the guide books are mostly it, poor though they may also often be (and that's partly because although they pay, they do not pay well. The sum total of what's wrong with China guides, why, and whose fault that is would be a very long posting indeed).

To see how poor guide books can be, simply look at the one for your home town. A few years ago I looked at the Lonely Planet guide to where I currently live to find it recommending a listings magazine that had been out of business for several years (and several editions of the guide) and a festival that hadn't been in operation for a decade. Even though it should be pointed out that such criticism is easy to make, and one should also point out the thousands of other facts (setting aside the truly abominable prose) that were actually correct. But still there's no excuse for this.

But worse, try looking up descriptions of your own city on-line. The majority of it gets no mention at all. Facts are wrong all over the place. For the most part the comment is threadbare, incomplete, inarticulate, incomprehending, or just plain wrong, even from English speakers visiting an English-speaking destination. To return to China, and in particular to Beijing, on Trip Advisor the no. 1 thing recommended to do is to take a motorbike tour. It's beyond risible. And most of the city's attractions (as well as restaurants, hotels, etc.) get no mention at all.

I can first recall meeting someone in China who said, 'I don't use guide books' 15 years ago (in Xi'an). He then promptly borrowed mine. Certainly relying solely on guide book recommendations is no longer necessary, but then it never was. There were always friends who had been to the same place, people met while shopping for guide books (in places like Stanfords, at least), cultural friendship societies, travel articles in papers, and most importantly, people met on the road who had just come from wherever one was going.

Getting other travellers' opinions is hardly something invented by the Internet, and it certainly doesn't render guide books obsolete (not that it has been suggested they are). People would borrow each other's copies of Lonely Planet China (unfortunately there was little other choice at the time) and mark in corrections, circle recommended guest houses or ones to avoid based on their personal experiences. Such encounters are still today more valuable than on-line opinions, since face-to-face a lot can be told straight away about whether the person speaking can be relied upon, and questions for specific details asked so that you find out what you want to know straight away and in response to your current situation and needs.

I have to admit I'm about to go travelling extensively in a part of the world with which I'm unfamiliar and where I don't speak the language, but a guide book to the continent in question and a couple of country guides, while I'll be using them with a critical eye, remain my main sources of information. I've looked up a couple of things on-line, but I'm always appalled at the mountains of utter dross that has to be waded through to find what may be (as far as I'm able to tell) a tidbit of useful information, or even a well-expressed opinion from a non-commercial entity.

There's obviously some value there, and a great deal of useful information to be found on-line that would once have required a specialist travel agent, but little of it in random on-line comment. Things in the future may be different, but the death of the guide book has been foretold several times before, and setting aside their portability, relatively low cost compared to other devices, relative immunity to being dropped, lack of need for batteries, and so on, they'll remain the best starting point for some time to come, I suspect.

Peter N-H

hopeless_nomad

Peter, could you consider editing down your responses? Just a friendly suggestion. You wrote 11 long paragraphs about guide books, but I feel you could have gotten your main point across (whatever your main point was) in just two. It would be a nice courtesy to your fellow posters and I assure you they will be more likely to read your writing.

And yes, my remark to you was a follow-up to another thread that was closed by admin because it was too off-topic and pretty out of control.

PeterN_H

> Peter, could you consider editing down your responses? Just a friendly suggestion.

Please note that the topic of this forum is travel in Asia, not 'What I think of other posters' or 'How long I think people should write.'

http://www.fodors.com/faq/joining.cfm#join3

samuell

where is the OP??

hopeless_nomad

Peter:

I mentioned editing down your responses in the hope of nudging you from writing "utterly pointless, silly, and thoroughly unhelpful" postings. Because actually saying that to you (as you did to someone who responded to your Rio apartment thread) would be rude.

Now back to enjoying my weekend. I sincerely hope you're enjoying your weekend too, wherever you are.