We are planning to visit China in June and would like to know if anybody stayed in Prime Hotel Beijing and your opinion about it. If it is not a good choice, do you have any advice for us? We would like to be in walking distance to the cultural sites, rooms need to be quiet and very clean. Great breakfast would also be good... Marina.

The Prime (Huaqiao Dasha) was originally a Swedish joint-venture, and is a very solid building with the largest standard rooms in Beijing--noticeably much larger than usual. The Swedish connection was short-lived, but until about four years ago there were still a number of foreigners in senior management keeping things running fairly well, although the hotel went a decade without proper refurbishment. I believe the current GM is a Hong Kong man who took over about five years ago, and who finally persuaded the building's owners to do a major refit just last year. I haven't seen the hotel since that was done, but the rooms should now be fresh and modern.

Don't expect from a Chinese five-star which you would usually expect from other five-stars. The Prime takes its share of Chinese tour groups for a very low average room rate, and if there's any problem with noise it's likely to come from that quarter rather that from outside (early morning shouting in the corridors and door banging as the tour groups leave), although with the frantic pace of construction in Beijing it's almost certainly that some building will be coming down and another going up in your immediate vicinity wherever you stay in the city at the moment.

The hotel is at the top end of Wangfujing, diagonally opposite the National Art Gallery (not of much interest). It's walking distance from the north entrance to the Forbidden City and from the park opposite from whose hilltop you can look down on the palace's plan. It's not in easy walking distance of a metro station, which is a drawback given Beijing's increasingly choked traffic--a problem made more complicated in this area by the contruction of a new north-south metro line one block east. Probably the south end of Wangfujing would be considered Beijing's most central location (since there's no hotel on Tian'an Men Square itself), but The Prime is more central than most.

You really shouldn't be paying too much for this hotel, and if it's anything in the region of US$100 you should be looking at more familiar names in the same area.

The breakfast buffet used to be fairly extensive under the previous F&B Director, who was Austrian but is now in Shanghai.

Peter N-H
http://members.axion.net/~pnh/China.html

Thank you, Peter. Would Marco Polo or Grand Hyatt be a better choice as far as location, etc.?

Check out the Capital Hotel. Really nice, clean, great restaurants, large rooms. Stayed there over Christmas along with the London Philharmonic. Great location, easy walk to Tianimen.

I must admit I like both of those hotels, which are roughly equidistant from the Tian'an Men and the Forbidden City. You can walk there in about 20-30 mins or in each case take the metro for one stop. The Grand Hyatt sits on top of the city's largest mall in the thick of its best-known shopping (although much of that differs little from what you'd find in malls at home) and directly over a metro station. The Marco Polo is smaller, and less grand, but its smaller public areas are attractively designed, and give it a more the flavour of a boutique hotel. It should be cheaper than the Grand Hyatt, and its location is quieter. It is only a few minutes' walk from metro stations on each of two different lines.

Peter N-H
http://members.axion.net/~pnh/China.html