China Hotels for Foreigners: Booking & Registration
You can book local Chinese hotels as well as international chains. Bring your passport for check-in; the hotel handles the required police registration.
Getting to know Chinese hotel chains
Hanting (汉庭) is H World’s budget chain. The group’s midrange chain is JI Hotel (全季), whose style centres on simple interiors, bamboo and wood tones, and tea in the lobby.
Atour (亚朵) sits in the upper midrange. The full brand name matters when comparing listings: Atour Light is its midrange brand, while Atour S is positioned higher, in the upscale category.
Brand positioning: H World and Atour. Design: JI Hotel’s brand guide (Chinese).
Trip.com is one English-language option for booking Chinese hotels, including these domestic chains.
Room windows and laundry
Internal windows. Some hotel rooms have windows facing an indoor corridor rather than outside, so a window does not necessarily mean natural daylight. These may be labelled “Window faces hallway” or 内窗.
Laundry. Self-service washers and dryers are available even at some budget hotels, including Hanting branches. Atour offers free laundry facilities. Look for “self-service laundry” in the facilities list: “laundry service” can also mean washing charged by the item.
Guesthouses and private stays
At a guesthouse or holiday apartment, your host can handle police registration for you. Once they’ve registered your stay, you don’t need to make a separate trip to the police station.
If you’re staying with friends or family, they can help with registration too. For a stay in a private home, you or your host need to complete it within 24 hours of arrival. Local online services can save a trip to the station.
Travellers’ accounts give a less uniform picture of how this works on the ground. In a January 2026 discussion, one traveller said their hosts registered both of their Tujia homestays. Another described a self-check-in apartment in Beijing where the owner did not know which channel to use; the police later called and the registration had to be resubmitted.
Some visitors also report staying with friends or relatives without registering and never being contacted. In a June 2025 discussion, that experience appeared alongside a host’s account of police calling after a missed deadline on an earlier visit. These are individual accounts; how registration is handled varies by host and location.
If a hotel refuses check-in
Hotels must not refuse foreign guests because they lack a “foreign guest” qualification. The national accommodation policy also calls for platforms and hotels to correct unlawful restrictions on overseas guests. If a listing says “mainland Chinese ID only”, ask the booking platform to resolve it with the property.
If the issue is registering a foreign passport, ask the hotel to contact its local police registration office for assistance. For a booking whose guest policy said foreign guests were accepted, contact the booking platform about the discrepancy and ask it to arrange a resolution with the property.
You can also call 12367, the immigration service hotline, for policy advice or to report an accommodation problem. The official accommodation measures specify round-the-clock Chinese and English service and coordination with the 12345 local government hotline.