Beijing tourism authorities will launch a recruitment drive for homestay accommodations for Olympic visitors.

Xiong Yumei, Beijing Tourism Bureau’s deputy director, said citizens in eight urban districts could apply to nearby community offices if they think their housing conditions meet the standard for homestay accommodation.

The standard, released in late March, requires ‘Olympic Family Hotels’ to have special bedrooms for foreign guests, washing, bathing and cooking equipment. At least one person in the family should be able to communicate with the guests in a foreign language.

About 1,000 such homestays will be selected. Applications will end April 30.

The charge for each room is initially set to be between RMB400 and RMB600 ($57 to $85), far lower than most hotels.

The suggestion is that there are, in fact, enough hotel rooms for visitors. The home accommodation is intended to let foreign visitors experience the life of Beijingers and have friendly exchanges with them.

The China Travel Service Head Office and the China International Travel Service Head Office (CITS) will organize homestay accommodation guests.

In Yayuncun in Chaoyang District, a pilot place for the program, 41 homes have been selected from 60 as homestay accommodation candidates.

Han Rubing, a college English teacher who lives in Yayuncun, said she would do some fitments in her two-bedroom home if it is selected to be an ‘Olympic Family Hotel’.

She said, ‘If we are lucky enough to play host to foreign guests, we will do our best to make them feel satisfactory.’

The illustration is NOT of a typical Beijing homestay but it IS of a Beijing homestay. Check in out HERE.
Source: China View

Tang Xiaofreng, senior hotel business development manager for Ctrip.com, China’s largest online reservation site said, ‘Only some 20 hotels in Beijing still have rooms available for reservations by foreign tourists during the period.’ For the most part, he said, ‘only luxury suites are left for them to choose.’

All else being equal Westerners are going to want to stay where English is spoken.

Beijing, which is expecting about 500,000 foreign visitors and more than one million Chinese tourists to descend on it during the Games, has 806 rated hotels with 220,000 beds, according to the tourism administration.

On average, these hotel rooms are going (or went) for about 10 times their usual rate for the duration of the Games.

Earlier this year, the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee said it expected the rate for a double room in a five-star hotel during the Games would be about RMB2,960 or about $390 a night, $300 for a four-star, $203 for a three-star and $135 for a two-star.

This was a tad optimistic.

Home Inn, one of Beijing’s no-star ‘budget’ hotels, said that during the Games its standard double is renting for $222 a night, compared to $25 today.
At the comfortable but by no means fancy four-star Comfort Inn and Suites in Chaoyang District, the central business and diplomatic quarter it is $640 for a room that costs $97 a night this week.
Near the top end of the Olympic rental scale, The Renaissance Beijing in Chaoyang District is charging $1,112 a night for a deluxe room that usually goes for $222 to $305. Only longer-stay visitors need apply.

These kind of Olympic hotel prices are well outside the realm of the possible for most domestic Chinese tourists. A huge range of much, much cheaper — no-star — hotels are available. To Westerners as well as Chinese. The problem is no one in them speaks very much English and international credit cards are often not accepted.
Source: Canada.com

Interesting possibilities here. The news is the first China-made bullet train designed to run at 300 kilometers per hour has completed a test run and will be in service between Beijing and Tianjin in early August. Which you do not need to be reminded is the start of the Olympics.

Shao Liping, director of the railway authority in Nanning, capital of the southern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region said, ‘A train prototype rolled off the production line in December and has completed a test run.’

The new train is expected to be running along a 117-km intercity railway beginning August 1, a week before the opening of the Beijing Olympic Games.

It will reduce the travel time between Beijing and Tianjin to around 30 minutes from the current 70 to 80 minutes.

Using some lateral thinking:

The prices of a decent hotel room at the Games are enough to try men’s souls. Probably no one will attend EVERY day of the Olympics. So stay in a hotel near the railway station in Tianjin and commute in every day.

This is not a far-fetched idea.

The writer goes to the Frankfurt Book Fair every year. Gunter Grass wrote: ‘When God made Frankfurt he shat concrete.’ Gunter Grass is too kind.

So one stays in Mainz, an university town where moveable metal type printing was invented by Johnannes Gutenberg (neat museum) and commutes in daily. Much, much less expensive and as Mainz is an university town one meets a better class of person.
Source: China Daily

The idea that Beijing needs to invest in cultural tourism is, on the face of it, ludicrous. Almost by definition Beijing IS cultural tourism.

However, although the city has been in a turmoil for what appears to be years as it prepares it cultural treasures for the throngs who will come to the Olympics, Beijing also plans to invest in a number of sites that are significant in the cultural tourism sector.

Ahead of the Olympic Games this year, the city will redevelop a number of popular visitor locations, including Tianning Temple.

The three major Shijingshan monuments — Charitable Temple, Fahai Temple and Cheng’en Temple — as well as Western city’s Huoshen Temple will also be given a refurbishment.

Kong Fanzhi, secretary of the Beijing Cultural Relics Bureau, said the plans represent the continuation of a trend that has been sustained in China in recent years,

People’s Daily Online reports,’In the past eight years, Beijing has improved over 139 ancient buildings and 106 recently opened sites or expanded monuments, including the Wangshou Temple, Ji Xiaolan home, and the emperors’ temple.’

This year’s development plans will deal with 31 sites across Beijing at a cost of RMB120 million across the city.

Wrong, perhaps, at the time time to suggest it, but there is a medical condition called Stendhal’s Syndrome which has been identified and has been attributed to too much culture in too small a time.

Perhaps Beijing should advertise itself as the city worth many trips.
Source: Opodo

For many Beijing expatriates, the looming Olympic Games presents a possibility to bypass the chaos in August, vacating their homes in order to collect fees of up to RMB3,000 ($420) per night — or even more — from tourists seeking an alternative to hotel accommodation.

Hundreds of Westerners have already reached private agreements to become home-stay hosts, either through specialized agencies or direct negotiations with tenants.

Homestay Beijing specializes in this area. The owner of the agency, Piet Bos, said, ‘Each home is different, but as a rule of thumb, the current rate we use to establish pricing for home-stays is RMB500-750 per person that can stay in the apartment per day. In other words, if you have a two-bedroom apartment, where a maximum of four people can stay, then the average price per night is RMB2,000-3,000 yuan.’

For Olympic visitors, home-stay accommodation can be more affordable than staying in a hotel, as well as providing greater living space and a more localized experience of life in the Chinese capital.

Meanwhile, local expat websites such as Beijing Community have also become forums for individuals to reach private home-stay agreements.

In January, the Beijing Tourism Administration announced the recruitment of 1,000 local households as ‘Olympic family hotels’.
Source: China.org.cn

Disposable chopsticks are under attack all across China.Over the past three decades, the snap-apart sticks have become a staple of hectic city life, used by everyone from migrant workers eating fish balls at street stalls to busy professionals ordering takeout sashimi. China’s disposable-chopstick factories turn out roughly 63 billion pairs each year.

The campaign to banish them from Chinese tables is pitting environmentalists against the nation’s booming disposable-chopstick industry, which employs more than 100,000 people.

Since November, about 300 Beijing restaurants have vowed to replace disposable chopsticks with reusables. Big companies, including Microsoft, Intel and IBM, which already use reusables have invited Greenpeace to stage antichopstick rallies in their cafeterias.

In December, China’s Ministry of Commerce issued new guidelines urging restaurants to ‘reduce the use of disposable chopsticks.’

Beijing’s Olympic committee is banning disposables during the Olympic Torch Relay and at a number of other events at this year’s ‘green Olympics.’

China is the world’s biggest disposable-chopstick producer but one of its major outlets is Japan. As yet there seems to be little sign of the campaign catching on there.
Source: AJC.com

More and more five-star hotels are being constructed in Beijing in a bid to open up before the Summer Olympics. The latest to announce its launch (scheduled for May 1st this year) is
The Westin Beijing, Chaoyang.

Part of a mixed-use complex along the Liangma River in the capital’s eastern embassy district of Chaoyang (the same district as where the Olympic Green will be), the hotel will have 565 rooms and suites, Heavenly Spa (The Westin’s own brand spa) and 1,100 square meters of function space including two ballrooms and 10 meeting rooms.

Pictured on the right is new General Manager, Daniel Aylmer, who has over 15 years’ experience in the hospitality industry, including three previous positions at Starwood hotels in China.
Source: PR The Westin Beijing, Chaoyang

Hilton will open a  new Hilton Doubletree in  Beijing in time for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

The hotel will have 547 guest rooms including 110 suites. Public facilities include two restaurants, a lounge, a number of meeting rooms, a ballroom, and a health club and swimming pool.

Doubletree by Hilton Beijing is located at the South West 2nd Ring Road, just 38 kilometers from the airport, next to the Central Official District of Beijing (COD) and Beijing’s Financial Street and with easy access to major tour attractions like the Beijing Century Monument, Tian’an men Square, Forbidden City, and the Temple of Heaven.

In July Carlson Hotels will open a new Park Plaza hotel near one of Beijing’s Olympic venues. The hotel is located in northwest Beijing in the Haidian district, home to several universities and many high-tech start-ups.

Centrally located in this lively district will be the Park Park Beijing West on Chang An Boulevard. The 13-story hotel includes 300 guest rooms, each about 40 square meters, as well as a business center, gym, spa, banquet room and meeting rooms.

Carlson has doubled its presence in China in the last three years, and now manages nine hotels under the Regent, Radisson and Park Plaza brands.

A further six hotels are under development in addition to the Park Plaza Beijing West. Carlson has announced a partnership with top Chinese property developer Sunshine 100, which will see the portfolio more than double with hotels in cities such as Tianjin, Chongqing, Changsha, Shenyang, Yantai, Nanning, Liuzhou and Guilin.
Source: Asia Travel Tips

Olympic organizers in Beijing have announced that there are 132 official reception hotels for this summer’s games. The Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games said there are 120 contracted hotels for the event providing 30,000 rooms for the duration of the games.

The organizers said 38 are five-star hotels, 45 are four-star, 22 are three-star and 15 are not yet star-rated. The average room rate for a double room in a five-star hotel in Beijing will be $383 and $295 on average in a four-star hotel.

The other 12 official reception hotels are in six co-host cities, including Hong Kong, Shenyang, Tianjin, Qingdao, Qinhuangdao, and Shanghai.

In 2007, during the inaugural ‘Good Luck Beijing’ event, more than 40 designated hotels were given to some 8,000 athletes, officials and media staff. The event was designed to test the games organizing committee’s efficiency and readiness.
Source: AHN