Astor House Hotel

We stayed in this beautiful 3-star hotel for the four days we were in Shanghai.

I first came upon the hotel on hotels.com. Thanks to the hotel booking website, the rate for a 4-person room was the lowest I could find (S$70.88 per night). When I went to the hotel's website, the Deluxe Twin Room was not even on the list, and the rooms were expensive. I am glad I found hotels.com and will most likely use them again for my next trip.

I had an enquiry and made a call to the toll-free hotline. To my surprise, the pick-up was prompt and the reply to my query was confident and professional. It gave me a lot of confidence in this website. First time booking through a third party and it was a good experience!

I learnt from my Bangkok trip that the hotel you stay in should preferably be one that cab drivers are familiar with. We had problems going back to our Bangkok hotel by cab because none of the drivers knew about the one-year-old hotel. In the end, we had to tell them to go to the nearest four- or five-star hotel before directing them to our hotel. I thought a 165-year-old hotel couldn't go wrong, and I was right! All the cabbies knew the hotel even if they didn't know the road!

The most famous thing about this hotel is probably the fact that Albert Einstein had made a brief stay in it about a hundred years ago. I thought it would intrigue my father if I told him about it. His response? "Wouldn't that make it a very old hotel?"

The hotel is located at the end of The Bund, after crossing a short bridge by the name of Wai Bai Du (外白渡桥）, constructed in the early 1900s.

The reviews said that the hotel is 'a short walk' from The Bund, Pearl Tower and Nanjing East MRT Station. It is not true by our standard.

It is about 20 minutes walk from the MRT station.

I found the MRT station too far to walk. We ended up taking cabs wherever we went. The cabs are cheap, by the way. Most of the time, the fare ranged from RMB 12 (the starting fare) to 20-something, which is like S$2.40 to S$4 or S$5.

The service was good I thought. I didn't really have much dealings with the counter staff, but where I had requests ie. borrowing a power adaptor for my camera battery charger, asking about where locals eat and tour to Hangzhou, buying tickets for ERA show, all enquiries were nicely attended to. Oh, but don't bother emailing them. I emailed them three times - two in English and one in Mandarin, at two different emails too, and no response from them at all.

A RMB 500 deposit is required at check-in, which will be returned to you at the end of the stay. The same applied to the Beijing hotel I stayed in subsequently.

I love the hotel's quaint, gothic and woody feel - even the flooring is laid with timber - although like Coco, I sometimes imagined that some phantoms of the past might appear in the bathroom to speak to me about some injustice done to them before they died. Coco was worse. She didn't have alot of good sleep in the hotel. She said she was worried that some ghosts, zombies or vampires might jump out in the middle of the night to haunt us. Haha ...

However, geographically, I would not recommend others to live in this hotel unless you don't mind the walk. If I had an option, I would choose a hotel along Nanjing Road to avoid the hassle of walking.

 

Exterior of the hotel 

Night view of hotel front

  

 The beautiful exterior at night attracts wedding couples to have their wedding portrait taken across the road

 The conceirge

Entrance to a small bar or restaurant of the hotel

Main display at the lobby

 

The hotel had two lifts - an ancient lift and a modern one.

 The ancient one requires a lift operator to man the lift.

The lift operators were too shy to have their pictures taken.

 The old lift buttons

 

A display hall of the hotel's past

Telephone and typewriter

 

Big big room we had

The beds, like all other beds in China, were hard. I missed my Sealy bed.

 Two bottles of mineral water were given every day, provided we finished the given ones

I changed S$2400 (about RMB 12500) for the trip

 

Coco loved the long bath

The weighing scale did not work though

 Toiletries, without toothpaste

 Shower foam and shampoo

 Even the ceiling is high

"Place the tag on the pillow if the beddings require a change"

We totally forgot about that. Guess what happened?

Address:

Astor House Hotel
No. 15 Huang Pu Road    

 浦江饭店
15号，黄浦路