Hotel Review : Sycamore Tree Hotel, Changsha

 Review, photo copyright by : Gan Yung Chyan, KUCINTA SETIA

I got Ctrip.com service centre at Changsha Huanghua Airport to advise me how to contact Sycamore Tree Hotel to pick me up and I managed to contact Sycamore Tree Hotel Uncle Liu to pick me up at column C6. The exit is next to the Ctrip.com service centre of the airport and there are long queues of cars awaiting to pick up guests at the airport.

Sycamore Tree Hotel is an hourly-rated hotel that allows guests to stay up to seven hours a day or to the next day. It has a three-hours room stay package for guests who are transitting to another city on the same day but since Trip.com is selling the room based on per day basis, I paid less than $30 to stay until 8 pm on the same day.

To kill time, under my request, Uncle Liu chaufferred me to two plane-spotting sites around the Changsha airport for plane photography at a return fee of 150 RMB from 2.30 pm to 5.30 pm, including Gao'an Village Committee Building and the premises around Hunan General Aviation Building. This fee includes the driver's waiting time. 

Uncle Liu has very good knowledge on plane-spotting and I recommend plane-spotters to stay in this hotel if their purpose of visiting Changsha is plane-spotting.

Uncle Liu quipped that he also can bring guests to Zhangjiajie in Hunan.

While the staff of Sycamore Tree Hotel is friendly, I would like to comment that the room allocated to me has no window, no regular-size table for me to write on paper and no study chair. It takes a long time for the room to turn cool after switching on the air-conditioner. The toilet-cum-bathroom only has the small bath towel for body wiping purpose. Overall, the room is worse than the single room of Toyoko Inn. Despite the insufficiencies in the room, I recommend this hotel for staff friendliness, airport pick-up/drop-off services and local transport service. 

For breakfast and other meals, there is the bun shop next door and the noodles restaurant of one minute walk away from the hotel. For recreation, there is the games machine outside the hotel.

I will stay at Sycamore Tree Hotel again if there were another opportunity of an onward flight at night from Changsha to another city airport.