Lijiang Old Town is a fairy tale maze of stone alleys, pastoral bridges over water canals and beautiful traditional houses featuring rich carved woodwork and iconic roofs. Clear air, blue skies, and intoxicating scent of flowers everywhere, reflecting the love of
the local Naxi for nature, people and life.
If you wish to feel this soul of Lijiang and enjoy peace and warm hospitality, in a great location and at a very friendly price, this is the Inn for you.
Its location is a huge advantage: in a quiet alley, yet within short walking distance from all of the Old Town's gems, and near the Northeast Gate. This is a crucial detail you will truly appreciate when you need to park your car, call a cab, rent a motorbike or choose a pickup point for organized tours, since cars cannot enter the Old Town.
The stay was an experience of warm, family-like hospitality. Fresh fruit, snacks and water bottles are always available for you in the central room. Mr. Li Tianfu, the heart of the place, takes care of your every need with a constant smile, and provides advice and help in any field. Very valuable especially to foreign tourists (wechat ***********).
The inn is a traditional house built around a sunny, flower-filled courtyard and full of stunning carved wood. The rooms are clean and pleasant, equipped with A/C, electric blankets and great Wi-Fi. A laundry machine and detergents are also at your disposal. As is common in the dense layout of Lijiang, the second-floor rooms are brighter and sunnier.
10 steps from the Inn you will find everything you need: a convenience store, a traditional bakery, various tourist shops, and a special gem: Wei Wei’s Cafe-Bar, which is well worth a visit for excellent coffee, beer, great music and a unique atmosphere created by this special woman (wechat ***********).🌷
PPsymondDespite the convenient location, comfortable beds, and all-important quiet sleep we managed to get, the hotel's communication to arrange our pick up from the train station at night and what turned out to be a self-check-in was just dismal, clearly needing more training to ensure better organisation for future guests. The following constructive advice is to help the hotel improve and for (particularly foreign) guests to note:
1. Ask for guests' phone number and inform the driver well in advance of our arrival, instead of waiting till the very last minute to do so. We reached out to the hotel via WeChat the day before and rightfully received detailed instructions (in Chinese) to find the driver (the pick up service is actually outsourced to a separate company using 3 different vans), but once we found the van, the driver angrily insisted we call the hotel to identify us by confirming our phone number - we were not allowed to board without the hotel's confirmation, which should have been done directly with the driver well in advance of our arrival.
2. This hotel is not manned after hours, let alone 24 hours, so please make it known well beforehand that we will have to check in ourselves if arriving after hours, and provide clear instructions on how to do so instead of communicating them through the phone while guiding us using the security cameras. It is not the guests' responsibility to do your administrative work (to report ourselves to the authorities by scanning the police QR code and filling out our details) at 11 o'clock at night when we have an early morning train to catch the following day. The hotel should allow guests to enter the room as soon as possible upon arrival, not have us wait half an hour while they struggle with what was clearly their first time checking in foreign guests - worse still over the phone - insisting that this be done before we could enter our room.
3. If the hotel truly wants the patronage of foreign guests, they will have to prioritise our convenience and comfort over theirs by actually having someone check us in in-person. Remotely doing so to save costs is as absurd as expecting foreign guests to communicate our details over the phone, sending photos of ourselves, our passport details etc. via WeChat, and then finding our room card and the room by talking to someone over the phone in Chinese. At the very least, these requirements and instructions should be clearly produced and communicated beforehand so that nothing is improvised.
We hope the above experience helps improve what is a decent hotel providing good value for money.