If this was some place in the US, I could easily find a cheap hotel chain
nearby (like I did in Anaheim). In Europe, it's a little more difficult,
but still doable (thanks, Google Earth). In China, I have no idea where to
even look. Sure, I can find a list of cheap hotels in Beijing, but I have
no idea where they are in relation to the meeting venue, or whether the
staff would speak English. The warning to have your destination written
down in Chinese, because the taxi drivers don't speak English doesn't
inspire confidence either.
For most business meetings, all this doesn't matter. You either have a
host that helps you out, or your Chinese sales office helps you out. For
an IETF meeting, we don't really have either of these.
Just as a data point, I was in Beijing for the PPSP workshop at the
beginning of the summer, and was able to come up with google maps to/from my
hotel, which was not the conference hotel, with enough Chinese that I could
hand the maps to a cab driver.
I'm not a native, but my impression is that one of the things you're paying
for at high-end hotels in China is staff that speaks English - but I've
never stayed at a hotel in China where no one spoke English; it might be
that just one or two people who spoke English, and everyone else would go
fetch someone when I needed to answer a question.
The only real point of confusion for me was that I didn't know what terminal
I was DEPARTING from, when exiting China. Both Star Alliance and OneWorld
fly out of the massive Terminal 3 (read more about this at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_airport), but I didn't know that, and
it took a little while at the hotel to figure out what to tell the cab
driver.
I put the address given at the IETF website ("29 Zizhuyuan Road Beijing
100089 China") into Google Maps, and then zoomed out - looks like we're in
Haidian District (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidian_District, "the
university district"). If you include the district in your searches for
hotels, that will at least keep you from being at the other end of
Beijing...
Spencer
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