The Ritz-Carlton Shenzhen

This was an excellent stay. The hotel is conveniently located in centre of Shenzhen, and the front desk administrator Sahar was incredibly helpful. She assisted me changing to king bedroom . Breakfast was at the highest possible standard! This stay was exquisite! A+++

Pros - Both our rooms at level 10 were relatively close to each other facing the Wong Tee Plaza. It might be a way of the said front desk staff allocating these rooms to us to compensate for our unpleasant check in experience (see below). Spectacular views and we managed to spectate the night light show on Saturday without needing to go to the Civic Centre. - Facilities are great including 24-hour well equipped gym and sauna (best of all hotels in China we experienced so far). - Rooms are relatively new and fully equipped with necessities, has a dyson air dryer, Toto automatic toilet, automated curtains and a steamer to iron the clothes. - Breakfast had a lot of varieties to offer (personally loved the oden and sushi section), good service too. - Housekeeping was amazing. As I was leaving my room, Joy asked if we were interested in their laundry services and we declined as we do not have much laundry to do. After the first day of housekeeping, she noticed we did simple laundry (1-2 pieces of undergarment) and offered us a complimentary mini laundry detergent. We appreciate her thoughtfulness despite the fact that we initially declined her services. - Check out was relatively seamless, I believe it was the front office manager that managed our check out and explained the deposit refund procedures accordingly. - Concierge was decent too as they suggested we are better off getting a Didi to transfer our move to our next destination, and helped us load our bags to the Didi. Cons The only downside experience was check in. We requested if it would be possible to have interconnecting rooms (all good if not, at least as close to each other as possible within the same floor). We were advised that given interconnecting rooms are not available for the same type of rooms: 1.The staff provided an offer (upgrade to one of the bigger rooms that has interconnecting room with free 3 days hotel breakfast for 2 out of 4 pax). The quote/offer was outside of our budget hence we declined the offer and we just accept our original booking via Trip.com with no interconnecting rooms. 2.After we declined, the staff informed us that she miscalculated the price (from RMB 31k down to RMB 20k) for the same offer. This is very odd/confusing to us especially with the price difference due to miscalculation, and she was trying to push this offer to us again which we declined. At this point, whatever price quoted to us of this offer lost its credibility and we proceeded to stick to our original booking. 3.The staff said that she will notify us via WeChat (she added us on WeChat) once the room is ready. Understood at that time it was before check in time (i.e. before 3pm) hence we decided to grab lunch and come back after the check in time. It was past 3pm and we heard nothing from her upon returning to hotel and had to approach the front desk to ask for an update. The same staff managed to provide us key card for one of the rooms while the other room is still not ready (it was past 3:20pm at that time). She said that she will arrange one of her coworkers to deliver the keycards to us once that other room is ready. Around 3:50-4:20pm, we heard nothing (I walked past the other room and noted the housekeeping has finished cleaning up the room and left). I had to go to the front desk to request an update and eventually obtained the keycard. I am not sure if the above stems from the individual's motivation or if this is part of the hotel's standard procedure to aggressively upsell (even if we already said no) or if the front desk is pressured to meet monthly KPIs, but that left us an unpleasant check in experience and obviously did not represent the check in hospitality standards of the hotel itself. Aside from the check in, we loved everything hence we had to give 4 out of 5.