This may seem a simple one, but one that might catch you out. Whenever you travel always keep the details of your hotel in the local language. You can do this in a variety of ways, by paper, picture or an app. For our trip we are using Tripit Pro and keep all of our bookings on the app. (Check out some of the other apps we are using here, Travel Apps.) Tripit is a useful way to keep a track of our travel days, but we also upload the hotel booking confirmations which are typically provided in English and the local language also.
When you arrive at an airport you may want to use a taxi to get to your hotel, all well and good, but our experience in China has been that the majority of local Chinese don’t speak English, and certainly can’t read it. So there is no point in trying to get a taxi if you can’t tell the driver where you want to go. Ride sharing apps like Didi, the Chinese equivalent of Uber, take the hassle out of explaining where you want to go, but they’re no good if you just want to jump in a taxi as we did when we left Universal Studios Beijing late at night.
It was easy for us to jump into a taxi at a taxi rank as I had all the hotel details in Tripit and was able to show the driver where the hotel was. He found it immediately and we had a hassle free trip back to our hotel.
Using translation apps is also helpful, but their translation of the hotel name might not be as good as the booking confirmation. We did use Google Translate on our trip back from Universal Studios Beijing to ask the driver to drop us at the end of the street we were staying (so we could go into the shops before heading back into the hotel).
