How to Find Accommodation in China – in Association with Wimdu

Over the months we’ve spent in China so far, I’ve had more experience than I’d like in finding different types of accommodation, from short term to long term.

And I’m pleased to say that Wimdu, who provided our lovely flat in Istanbul, are helping me bring you this overview of how to find accommodation in China.

Because that isn’t necessarily easy, even if, like us, you can speak, understand and read a bit of Chinese.

China is a vast country, with over 1.6 billion people. That means that there are always more domestic tourists than international tourists, especially during the peak holiday periods around Spring Festival – so most operators are focused on a Chinese-speaking market, rather than the foreign market.

Which can be a real shock to folk accustomed to the ease of the South-East Asia banana pancake trail.

So… here’s how to find accommodation in China, whether you’re looking for a year rental, a short-term let or a place to rest your head for the night. If you’ve got questions or tips of your own, do please leave me a comment.

A fairly typical budget foreigner long-term apartment in China.

How to Find Accommodation in China for a Year or More

Most Chinese rental contracts are for one year. Rental contracts in the south are typically paid monthly. North of Beijing, rent is typically payable either entirely in advance or with six months rent, plus deposit, plus broker’s fee in advance and six months rent halfway through the contract. Brokers usually charge a month’s rent and the deposit is around a month’s rent as well.

If you’re studying in China or working in China, your employer or university will most likely help you out with this process – if you’re not, your best sources for good value annual contracts are the websites ganji.com and 58.com. These are both in Chinese, but Google Translate can help you navigate them.

Be aware that the pictures shown on the site may not actually be of the flat that you are headed to see. Unless you hit a broker or private landlord who speaks English (rare), I’d recommend asking a Chinese friend, teacher or colleague to act as translator for you when calling to arrange a viewing.

Utilities are phenomenally cheap in China (often under a pound per month per item) but you will most likely need to arrange your own broadband internet (this post has information on how to do this).

If you’re checking out the location, never, ever use Google Maps in China. Always opt for Baidu maps.

A bewildering morass of signs.

How to Find Accommodation in China for a Few Months

Most Chinese cities with a large expat community will have websites tailored to expats and foreign visitors, and apartments tailored for the medium-term visitor, ready to move in straightaway, with professional cleaning, internet and English-speaking agents.

Prices are, of course, higher than those on ganji.com or 58.com, but this is how we found our apartment in Kunming.

Some useful sites with accommodation in the different cities that foreigners gravitate to include thebeijinger.com, shanghaiexpat.com and gokunming.com.

If there isn’t an expat site for the place you’re looking to find accommodation, and you’re not studying or working somewhere that can help you find a rental, you’ll need to navigate Chinese language sites until you find a broker to assist.

Detail of hotel room in Bali.

How to Find Short-Term Accommodation in China

Chinese cities that see a lot of tourists will also have a range of apartments available at rates that vary by the day, the week or even the month. These are most often studios or one-bedroom-plus-sofa “family rooms”, though, since many young Chinese couples live with their parents, there’s a fair smattering of love hotels too.

The most extensive range is to be found on mayi.com, but this is a Chinese language site and unless you have a Chinese phone and a Union Pay card, and read Chinese well enough to read the SMSs it sends you, or have a Chinese friend handy to help you, it won’t be a great deal of use.

Of the main Western apartment rental sites, Wimdu, perhaps thanks to its Chinese-language subsidiary airizu.com, has a good range of apartments in the major international tourist destinations in China – more than a hundred in Chengdu alone.

It’s always wise to start looking ahead of time, as the best deals go fast, and send an enquiry to all apartments you are interested in to confirm availability before you proceed to booking.

Accommodation in China - YHA Hostel in Xi'an.

How to Find Hotels and Hostels in China

China is so large, and its cities so vast, that no English-language booking site can cover a fraction of the options available.

As I’ve explained elsewhere, I’m a huge fan of travelling with a guidebook, and for China a detailed guidebook is extremely helpful (particularly when paired with a Chinese SIM card), although, again, they will only cover a small selection of the most central choices: you can also use the Lonely Planet website.

Chinese YHA hostels offer reliably good value accommodation – most offer family rooms and, though not as cheap as you might expect, they tend to have clean, modern, contemporary rooms that feel straight out of the more luxurious end of an IKEA catalogue. There are fairly few hostels in China, but most will have fliers for hostels in other cities that they recommend – these are well worth picking up.

Agoda.com has, in my experience, the broadest selection of hotels and guesthouses in China. The main international five-star brands live up to the standards set elsewhere; Chinese business hotels tend to be nicely decorated and very good value with Western bathrooms; cheap Chinese hotels are not for the faint-hearted.

Shoestringers should note that really cheap accommodation will not have a web presence in Chinese, let alone English.

Accommodation in China: train station hotel room.

How to Find Accommodation in China When You’re Stranded

There are hotels near most railway stations, bus stations and airports in China, and you’ll often find that the quality of the rooms belies the reception area. If you speak some Chinese, you may be able to negotiate a hefty discount from the rack rate, particularly since prices are often set to include lucky numbers.

A few railway stations and major airports have hotel booking desks, sometimes with people who speak English too. But if you look lost for long enough ar arrivals in any airport or the exit from most train stations, you’ll be accosted by a hotel tout – if you’re looking for one, they might well be standing at the exit with a Chinese language sign. In small towns and rural areas, the tried-and-true technique of pounding the streets will work.

Most hotel touts outside of the most obvious destinations don’t speak English so, as the Chinese don’t count on their fingers in the same way we do in the West, it’s a good idea to use a mobile phone or bank notes to establish and/or negotiate the price before you follow them to their hotel.

Wimdu logo.

16 Responses

  1. Tracey says:

    You could called that a Wimdu of opportunity! I have been following and throughly enjoying your blog for a while now; a great mix of personal experience/calamities, considered and informed top tips and lots of laughs.Thanks.

    • Theodora says:

      Thank you! It’s all going to go quite calamitous for a while now, unfortunately. But I’m going to try and leaven the misery….

  2. sushil says:

    yeah..i stayed already a month in Kunming. I found its important to visit Chinese city with maps written in Chinese and English, otherwise no taxi will take you to your destination. difficult to communicate in English. if we speak Chinese also our pronunciation they can’t follow…

    i was tired explaining them when going for sightseeing in kunming

    • Theodora says:

      Yes, having directions in Chinese is pretty vital until your pronunciation’s reasonable, which takes a while. It’s not just the tones but all the ch/sh/shy sounds they have…

  3. Hey Theodora,

    As you mentioned above about chinese language sites… If you use the google chrome browser (on a laptop at least) it has built in translation options so you can get all chinese websites converted to English as you browse. Its relatively consistent too.

    We’ll be in china later this year so thanks for the accommodation info. How did you manage to get a visa longer than 3 months? They seem really picky at the moment. Did you have to have a list of pre-booked hotels?

    Thanks.

    • Theodora says:

      Hi Tom,

      Google Translate actually works OK on most Chinese language sites, you’re right, provided you have the imagination to work through the odd translations (every flat in Harbin comes with a “Methodist” according to Google Translate…). The problem is when it comes to dealing with the phone or SMS at the end

      We had an absolute nightmare with visas, which I’m going to blog about: they only issued us the 30 day tourist in Nepal (see here: http://www.escapeartistes.com/2013/01/31/a-very-merry-christmas-at-the-chinese-embassy-kathmandu-visa/).

      The visa situation in China is constantly changing, and they updated their rules three days before we entered the country, which meant the agency we’d been planning to use to convert the tourist L visa into an F visa (business) could no longer do it, so we had to go out to Hong Kong and use an agency there. I now have a six month multi-entry F but Zac only has single entry.

      I didn’t go for the visa in HK initially, cos when we did our research in the summer they were having a clamp down on business visas issued from Hong Kong. The embassy in KL certainly used to issue 90 day tourist visas, which they did for us on our first trip to China. You are almost always better off applying within Asia or in HK than in your home country, though — that’s been true for a long time. If they want hotel reservations then just book through a no-cancellation fee service, and the same with flights.

      I’ll do a post on this at some point soon, but hope this helps in the meantime.

  4. Elizabeth says:

    That son of yours is pretty darn handsome!!! I love Wimdu, I can’t wait to use them once we get back to Thailand.

    • Theodora says:

      Thank you! I think he is too. There’ll be a pic of him in his oh-so-attractive school uniform coming up on Facebook soon.

  5. Great tips – and resources! thank you!

  6. I feel like many things in China are a huge mental labyrinth! My father went back and forth with accommodation options, and I even gave misinformation when applying for a visa, only to have a last-mminute change of plans (while I was on the plane, no less! Imagine the nightmare of trying to find them if my dad hadn’t come for me!) Excellent tips…and I love that even Colonel Sanders made it into the post!

    • Theodora says:

      Thank you. Watch out for my riveting post on getting Zac an iPhone with a Pleco translation app on it. China just can be very, very difficult. On the plus side, the Chinese really do want to help you, at least outside the most-touristed parts.

  7. Larissa says:

    Great summary, Theodora. We prefer renting flats, and when we were in Beijing about a year ago I had difficulty finding one with my usual go-to resources. We ended up in an “Apart-hotel”, which was fine, but a little more impersonal than we prefer. I will stockpile this info for a futre trip!

    • Theodora says:

      China is fiddly, isn’t it? We had a whale of a time finding our flat in Harbin, I can tell you.

  8. heidi seidler says:

    Hi,
    i’ve got a question, i’m moving to xi’an end of Feb and im looking desperately for an apartment or a shared flat.i used to live in shanghai before which is much easier to find a place to stay since there are websites like smartshanghai etc but for xi’an, where do i start looking?
    any help is appriciated, just mail me Heidi.seidler89(at)outlook.com