To be clear, it has long been the case that not all hotels in China accept foreigners. This did not start with the pandemic. In fact, it has probably been true since Maoist times. In his classic memoir River Town, Peter Hessler recounts being rejected by hotels in Western China for being a foreigner back in the late nineties.
Personally, I have experienced hotels turn me away for as long as I've been in China. For instance, in 2013 I once travelled to Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province, 300 kms south of Beijing. Before going I booked a room in a 如家酒店 (Home Inn), a chain of hotels with branches all over the country. I arrived at 11 pm, only for a smiling young clerk to tell me apologetically that unfortunately they could not accept foreign guests. Never mind that when I called the chain's national service line to book, I had specified that I was a foreign citizen. After making some phone calls, a (more expensive) hotel that could take foreigners was located nearby, and a taxi was called to take me there (at my own expense of course).
This sort of annoyance isn't limited to remote parts of the country. It happens in cities like Beijing and Shanghai as well. On one occasion in 2017 I booked a room in a cheap hotel in Shanghai, only to arrive late at night and be told that they were unable to take foreigners. I had booked with an app on my phone, and it did specify somewhere amongst the reams of writing (in Chinese) that the hotel does not accept foreign guests, but I hadn't even thought to check. Luckily another chain hotel down the road was able to take me.
In my experience, finding Chinese hotels that welcomed foreigners had been getting harder for years even before the Covid pandemic struck. I don't think the regulations changed; quite simply, enforcement got stricter. In the past, some hotels were happy enough to bend the rules. If a foreigner travelled alongside locals, they would simply register the Chinese guests with their ID and ignore the foreigner. If they travelled alone, the hotel might let them stay without registering them and take their cash.
After the change in China's leadership in 2012, laws and regulations started to be enforced more strictly in all fields of life, including this one, and finding hotels that would acquiesce to foreigners staying illegally became harder. In 2019, I once spent hours wondering around the centre of Kunming late at night, trying to find a hotel that would take me in. Place after place rejected me, saying they could not accept foreign citizens. In desperation I looked in an app and found a 5-star hotel in the suburbs that purported to take foreigners. After calling to make sure, I took a taxi there and checked in. I ended up spending far more money than I had intended.
It is true that the hotels that reject foreigners tend to be the cheaper ones. But it is not true, as people sometimes claim, that foreigners are only prevented from staying in grotty places that are unhygienic or unsafe, and that these rules are there to "protect" foreigners or to make sure they come away with a good impression of China. During my time in China I have been rejected by numerous hotels that were perfectly decent, and accepted by others that were horrible.
Unlike many believe, it does not in fact appear to be true that hotels in China need a special permit to accept foreigners. At least, there is no national regulation that states this. There used to be, but it was abolished in 2003. Quite simply, article 39 of the Foreigners Entry and Exit Management Law states that hotels must register foreign guests according to "applied regulations" and report the registration to the local police authority.
Foreign citizens in China are supposed to register with the police within 24 hours of arriving in a locality. If you are staying in a hotel, they are responsible for registering you. While the hotels should be able to register foreigners automatically in their computer system, some of them may have to go to the police station to do this in person because their system does not accept foreign passport numbers (or it does, but they are unaware of how to use it).
It's always hard to get to the bottom of these things, but it seems that many of the hotels that refuse foreigners would be legally able to accept them, but want to avoid the hassle (or perhaps the scrutiny) that comes with registering them. It is also entirely possible that local authorities in various parts of China formally or informally prohibit or discourage hotels from taking foreigners, especially ones that are cheaper or not part of an international chain. Apart from anything else, this ensures the foreign guests spend more money.
Much probably depends on the attitude of local authorities and the police, which may explain the seemingly random way in which hotels in some areas are much more relaxed about having foreign guests than in other areas. When I travelled in western Hunan in 2018 pretty much every hotel seemed to accept foreigners, even in quite remote places, while in a relatively cosmopolitan city like Kunming finding a place to stay was a struggle.
It is even possible to argue that the widespread practice of hotels rejecting foreign guests is actually illegal under China's Consumer Protection Law. Some claim that if you call the hotel and threaten legal action, they will take you in. I've never tried this, but I find it unlikely it would work in all cases, especially when local authorities have exerted pressure in the other direction. In any case, this is hardly how you want to spend your time when you travel.
It must also be added that it is not only foreign citizens who get rejected in Chinese hotels. Certain Chinese minorities, particularly the ones native to the two regions that the government considers "restive", are also regularly (and shockingly) refused accommodation. The motivation is quite possibly the same: too much hassle from the police and local authorities, which puts hotels off from accepting them.
Essentially, the issue appears to be that if you belong to a group seen as a potential national security issue, or more recently a public health threat in the case of foreigners, your movements need to be monitored and controlled. This makes you a source of hassle and potential trouble. It may be nothing personal, but hotels don't want you (or have been told not to take you). Perhaps uniquely in the world, hotels rejecting guests has become one of the most overt forms of discrimination in China.
 |
| The booking page for a hotel in Sanya on a phone app. The encircled line says "we only accept guests from Mainland China". |
In vast swathes of China, especially in the North and West, upwards of 90% of hotels no longer give rooms to "international friends" at all. The few that do are often the most high-end ones (4 stars and above), making travel within the country much more expensive and inconvenient.
When I travel in China, I usually book hotels through the Tongcheng Travel (同程旅行) mini-program which I access through WeChat. I have learnt to always read carefully through the hotel's "policies" to see if I can spot the little phrase 仅接待大陆客人 (we only take guests from Mainland China), which appears depressingly often. In some instances they will say 仅接待大陆及港澳台客人 (we only take guests from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan), which is slightly more generous but still of no use to me (also take a second to reflect on how crazy it is that, 25 years after the handover, plenty of hotels in the Mainland won't even take Hong Kongers). Some of the places that carry this warning may turn out to take foreigners anyway, and some that don't still won't take you. It's all quite unpredictable.
It must be said that the situation still varies by the province. Last year I found it much easier to find accommodation in Hainan and Guangdong, both provinces that tend to be much more open to the outside world. A couple of hotels in Hainan did cancel my booking once they realised I was a foreigner, one of them a fancy resort in Sanya, but the second place I tried was always happy to take me.
Once you get away from touristy areas in the South, however, finding accommodation as a foreigner has become a struggle. Even in the outskirts of Beijing only 4/5-star hotels seem to accept foreign citizens at the moment, at prices that start from 6-700 Yuan a night. It used to be possible for foreigners to stay in 农家院 (rural homestays) in the mountains around Beijing with no questions asked. But on a recent trip of mine to such an area the local homestays (which double as restaurants) were wary of even letting me eat there, because they'd been told to report any foreigners they received.
If you travel somewhere and the handful of places that take foreigners are fully booked, then you're out of luck. Last year when I travelled to Yushu, I found that out of the dozens of hotels in the prefectural capital only three accepted foreigners. All three hotels were already sold out for the dates of an annual horse-riding fair, when people pour in from the rest of the county. I was going back to Beijing around that time anyway, but I ended up leaving a day early because of this.
The fact that more and more hotels around China won't let foreigners stay is an unwelcome development but not a surprising one, at least for me. It's part of a general trend towards closing off which started well before the pandemic, but has been heavily intensified because of it. There is much speculation about when China will give up on its policy of "dynamic clearance" of Covid and move towards some sort of coexistence with the virus. I have no idea when this might happen, but when and if the policy is abandoned it may take years before some of its unfortunate side-effects are rolled back, including this one.
Even if one day China's borders open up again, I think foreign travellers who come here are going to find a country vastly less easy to travel in than the one they remember.
