Celebrity International Grand Hotel, Beijing

Advantages: beautiful gardens free to visit, good location, very clean and polite staff
Disadvantages: expensive internet

..., apple, orange juice and water to! So you could really stock up as it was all you can eat and head out with a full belly to keep you going all day. When you leave the hotel there is a car bay where taxis and bus pull up on. If you stand out there some of the staff will call a taxi cab over for you to take you where ever you wanted. The heart of Beijing (Tian Square) was a short 5minute taxi ride and cost no more than £2 for 4 of us!! When we came home from our day out instead of eat in the hotel we walked 10 minutes up the street to the local restuarants. The hotel food was the same price as you would expect over here in a posh restaurant, and we also felt it wouldnt be such a good experience if we ate their instead of local places. Every meal we had out was AMAZING and so cheap! a meal for four including drinks never came to more... Read review

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Advantages: Frenzied energy of chaotic city, many worldclass tourist attractions, delicious food, incredibly safe & ridiculously cheap.
Disadvantages: Gruesome pollution, occasional racism targeting foreigners & lack of freedom for those who take an organised tour (not recommmended).

...is desperately simple. Book air tickets (I would recommend www.cheapflights.com as the ultimate booking resource), choose a hostel or hotel with an address from a guide book (I would recommend the Lonely Planet as usual, but the Rough Guide’s Beijing specific guide has some good day trips detailed that the Lonely Planet does not have) and saunter along to the Chinese embassy at 49-51 Portland Place, London W1N 4JL. There is also a consulate of some kind in Manchester where you can apply for visas. The new visa is a decent full-page affair with a print of the Great Wall. If you get a long term or working visa you’ll also get a rather fancy hologram. It should cost 30 pounds I think. A note on money before anything else. The Chinese currency is the RMB and there’s about 13 RMB to the pound. Given how cheap China is, and the fact the prices you... Read review

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Advantages: Everything you could want under one (massive) roof
Disadvantages: Located at the southern end of "The Strip" - so a bit of a walk to some attractions...

...We stayed at the MASSIVE MGM Grand for a few days this time last year. The MGM Grand, guarded by a 45-foot-tall bronze lion statue has 5,005 rooms and used to be the largest hotel in the world, a claim recently stolen by the Ambassador City Jomtien hotel in Thailand with 5,100 rooms. It's still the largest hotel in North America, although I think this will soon be stolen by George Clooney's Vegas hotel development... (While we're on the subject of large hotels, 17 of the 20 largest hotels in the world are in Las Vegas ! So even if you don't stay at The MGM Grand, odds are you'll be staying somewhere big...) The MGM Grand is part of the MGM Mirage group, that also owns, among others, The Bellagio, The Mirage, Treasure Island, New York-New York (just across the street) and Beau Rivage hotels/casinos in Vegas. The first thing... Read review

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