The Airport Hotel, 26th-27th October 2007

The Airport Hotel was hiccup No.4. We found the hotel was an unacceptable place for more reasons than one.

One employee at the hotel knew a smattering of English but it was very difficult to make ourselves understood.

Someone wanted to make a telephone call home but could get no help from the front desk at all.

One couple had to change rooms as the room allocated to them was in an unacceptable state.

The bathrooms had cockroaches running along the floor & up the walls (see photos) and the floor & wall tiles were in a very unclean state (see photos)

The next morning there was no breakfast room open & no information from the front desk as to where we were to eat. Later in the morning the front lounge opened and food was served buffet style. The only thing we recognised was boiled eggs & a small amount of bread (photo attached) we are not sure what was in the bowl of white milky stuff but no one was game to try it. Lunch was no better.

To say that we were in a "not happy Jan" state was an understatement.

I rang Greg (Our Golf China Agent) in Australia & told him of our plight.

Greg was exceptional in his response. I had interupted him on a business trip to Tasmania. He dropped everything and spent the rest of his weekend getting us home with many dramas in between.

Firstly he managed to get one couple booked onto business class home that night;
secondly he arranged for the rest of the group to stay at the New City Hotel at Dongguan (our first hotel in China) for the remainder of our stay in China;
Thirdly he arranged for the Golf China guide and Bus Driver to collect us from the airport hotel and stay with us for the duration of our stay.

We were to have our bags packed & be in the foyer of the hotel ready to be collected late afternoon. This we duly did. I collected our flight tickets from the front desk & told them that we were changing our accommodation.

So far so good. On arriving at the airport Des & Yvonne were told they had no booking and could not fly home that night. We collected Des & Yvonne & our golf bags from the airport & checked into the New City Hotel until Monday.

I found that very strange that the business class booking had not gone through & got Tony to check that the rest of the flights were still booked for Monday. To our horror we found that all our flights had been cancelled. The hotel staff at the airport hotel had given me no indication of the consequences of picking up the flight tickets. It is an automatic cancellation of the stopover arrangements. No one could speak English & I could not speak Chinese - so they just let us leave.

Greg was straight back on the job of getting us rebooked for Monday night. Unfortunately we could not get the business class bookings, but the next best being the front seats of economy where there is more leg room. The rest of us were booked onto economy also & we ended up having a reasonable comfortable trip home.

My mobile phone had 41 incoming calls, 15 outgoing calls and 22 SMS messages sent.
Greg did an above and beyond the call of duty to get us home. Without him we would have been in all kinds of trouble.

The moral of this story is never to travel without the back up of a good agent, a mobile telephone and a wireless laptop. Especially so in countries that do not speak English.

Images attached; hotel rooms, breakfast, us in the hotel foyer; with our luggage wating for the bus.