Jinjiang Inn Zhangjiagang Yangshe West Street Pedestrian Street

Pros +

• The hotel is conveniently located near a pedestrian street with plenty of local food options, along with a mall offering Western choices like Starbucks. Each of the rooms were equipped with functioning air conditioning units and the wifi connection was free and strong, unlike what previous, older reviews state. The staff do not speak English, but this is not a problem for me personally because I can speak Mandarin.

Cons -

• On the first night, the room smelled of smoke and the toilet did not flush. I spoke to the front desk, who said they would send someone up, and later on I was able to flush only once before the toilet stopped working again. By that point, we were checking out, so I reminded the front desk that this was still an issue.More concerning, however, were the business cards offering "special services" left underneath my door. On the first night, I wasn't entirely surprised that someone had slipped them under my door based on the overall vibe of the city and the reality that the hotel publicly advertised cheap room rates for only four hours at a time. Most of my friends staying in this hotel that'd been recommended to us also found these cards under their doors, so we joked about collecting them like Pokemon cards from childhood and saving them as a remembrance of our time in Zhangjiagang.When I returned to the hotel my second night, I found that the number of cards left under my door had more than doubled from the night before, but when I spoke to my friends, only the other male guests had received them this time. At checkout, I decided to ask the front desk, keeping in mind their response for this review. They told me that this behavior was not condoned by the hotel, and just two days before, they'd reported to the police a man who had snuck into the hotel through an emergency exit to leave these cards under guests' doors. "You shouldn't have received any last night," they assured me. I showed them the stunning collection I had amassed in just two nights and they apologized, though their story about "strange men" sneaking into the hotel through emergency exits and leaving these cards under the doors of (mostly) male guests raises significant concerns about the hotel's overall safety. Perhaps the hotel receives regular kickbacks for the cards; perhaps strange men are inexplicably drawn to this hotel.