Phoenix Hotel Inner Mongolia

“Comfortable accommodation”

Two big bowls of pink fake/plastic flowers are outside the hotel. Across the road from the hotel are a few shops selling soda, but not much else. The hotel has a big collection of gold lighting fixtures in the centre of a square at level 2 where the cafe is. Clean, basic rooms.

“Decent Hotel, But a lot was Lost in Translation”

The hotel itself has all the amenities you need. The rooms are of a decent size- the deluxe ones is 38 sqm. Even though the location is not "central", we found that it was very easy to go to these tourist attractions in the city- the Inner Mongolian Museum and Xilitu Zhao Si- by bus. Most of the ti… more

The hotel itself has all the amenities you need. The rooms are of a decent size- the deluxe ones is 38 sqm. Even though the location is not "central", we found that it was very easy to go to these tourist attractions in the city- the Inner Mongolian Museum and Xilitu Zhao Si- by bus. Most of the time, apart from rush hours, the buses are quite empty, just get your one-yuan note ready. We didn't have breakfast here, but if you are into local food, there are plenty of local restaurants including chain "sanitized" version of it around the area. What we found a bit difficult was communicating with the staff. The hotel tries to assist their guests by setting up a "duty manager" desk near the reception counter. However, very often we found getting our message across to the manager quite difficult (even when two of our friends do speak a bit of Chinese) and one of the "managers" even sounded unwilling to help. All these impressions could just be due to what was lost in translation. As when we found that our domestic flight was cancelled and that we were transferred to another much later flight, the "manager" let us have a very late check out without charge. The hotel also helped arrange for our visit the grassland the day before. By the way, the one day "tour" to the grassland- Xilamuren Da Caoyuan- didn't do anything apart from having taken us there and given us lunch. The "guide" didn't even give any information about tracks or routes that you could be on to see different spots in the grassland, all she said was "don't go far" (there was a Chinese gentleman in our tour group and the same non-information was given to him). If this is the "standard" for most of the tours, it means that you need to do the rest yourself eg. bargaining for a ride to the "attractions" yourself. So if you are doing it through some tours like the one we did, study beforehand where you want to see and walk there yourself as you can easily do, and avoid that "beating the fish's head in a bucket" (?) approach from the touts there. All in all, we did enjoy our stay here. However, we would not recommend it for a non-Chinese speaking persons, as this could prove very frustrating.

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“Impossible to communicate in English”

Since I arrived, it was almost impossible to communicate in English. Asking for a taxi for next day was almost an adventure. Rooms are quite small but clean. Breakfast is ok and wifi also fine. Bell boy was very kind and supportive.