Beijing City Central Youth Hostel

Central, good vibe, bad tour desk
The hostel is fine. Bathrooms have privacy curtains, but a little plastic litter and cigarette butts. AC is slow to start cooling, but once it kicks in is plenty cold. Plenty of hot water and force. Rooms are spotless, clean linens, TV, fairly new furnishings. Location right on a subway line is a plus, since subway is just 3 yuan to anywhere. The tour offered to Badaling to see the Great Wall is a disaster, really total crap. I am not sure how to do it better, but the tour two advertises the Chang tomb of the Ming tomb group, but instead goes to another one, which is much less interesting, and has almost no other tourists. Instead, most of the tour consists of visits to two jade factories and a Chinese tea shop, with only an hour and forty-five minutes at the wall, and no interesting commentary about the history and construction of the wall. The lunch is adequate, but uninspiring.

to be honest i wasnt that impressed with the hostel, altho the rooms were of a good standard. the staff were obviously oveworked and looked as tho they were about to fall asleep standing up. Stay away from the restuarant on the second floor its a rip off. a friend and i went in for what was advertised as a full english breakfast, what was served was a pencil thick sausage, one slice of floppy toast and one egg, my heart sank. the only benefits it has going is the location, being opposite beijings main station.

This hostel is quite clean, and the rooms are of a fine standard. However, the staff are incredibly stupid, incredibly useless and obviously overworked and disinterested. The room prices are not low for what you get, and the whole place is clearly resting on the laurels of its great location. I don't recommend it... there are many better places to stay in Beijing.

I wasn't too impressed with this hostel. The reception staff were incredibly slow, and didn't really want to help. The rooms were nice, but the bathrooms were a little dirty. The canteen's prices sounded reasonable, until you see the incredibly stingy quantities of food. My "bowl" of cereal was in fact two mouthfuls. And when I stayed there, they were doing noisy construction work on the hostel until a bit after midnight so I didn't get much sleep after my exhausting travels. Overall, I felt particularly unwelcome here.

Nice, clean place close to both the train station and the underground system. Make sure you get a room with a window, otherwise it will get really hot, even in winter. English speaking staff that can give you tips on how to get around in Beijing.

The hostel itself was really clean and quite nice. We enjoyed staying here. However, the trip they offered to the Great Wall was a TOTAL waste of time. We spent the whole day going to everywhere EXCEPT the Great Wall. We were allowed only about 1-1/2 hours there and then they asked for 60 RM EXTRA to ride the cable car up. And we were discouraged from walking the length of the wall by the tour guide who promised she would leave us be behind if weren't able to make it back in the allotted hour and a half. My sister came halfway around the world for this trip, so 1-1/2 hours was not enough. The tour guide was totally not helpful, and we went to a jade factory and a "pharmacy" where they wanted you to spend your money before we were allowed to finally see the Great Wall! DON'T TAKE THE TOUR!!!

This place was very special and very nice.