Tim’s Travel Tips: Tricky Thermostats

Next week I will start discussing our specific hotels and if they are any good.  Most of those hotels were Chinese brands.  This week the precursor is about thermostats in those hotels.

Mary Ann and I went to China in late October/early November and the weather was perfect.  Sunny, no rain, and not too cold or too hot with temperatures in the 70’s.  Some of the hotels didn’t cool the room as much as we thought they should have.  Some thermostats are in Chinese only and others with both Chinese and English.  It didn’t seem like rocket science setting the thermostat but sometimes we couldn’t get the room cool enough.  One hotel I remembered started at 29 degrees Celsius (84 degrees F).  We liked to set the thermostat at 20-22 degrees Celsius (68-70 degrees Fahrenheit).  The temperature never went down, although the fan was moving air.

Were we doing anything wrong?  Our Australian Partner, Cam Mitchell, mentioned that sometimes the hotels limit the cooling.  This wasn’t the case in Shanghai or Hong Kong (set very cool), but once you get out into other parts of China, the cooling was hit or miss.

So why didn’t we call the front desk?  The temperature wasn’t unbearable for one, Cam’s comment about hotel cooling made sense, but also we knew that there would probably be a language issue and not worth it.  We were off to the next town the next day anyway.


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