The Meritus Mandarin is a good standard international hotel, with good clean rooms, efficient service and good standard amenities and our stay over three nights was enjoyable. We had booked the Mandarin Club rooms which supposedly was larger (not true!) , better deocrated and with better amenities. This is not quite true either. The Club Lounge did not offer any spreads for morning or afternoon snacks and cocktail food as advertised. Breakfast however, was quite decent at the Club level when we did not want to be with the large crowd in the Coffeee House. So all in all, we could have got better value with standard rooms (which were the same size).
One service snag, however, did occur. Ordering soft-boiled eggs was a real pain. On the first morning, the waitresses could not understand the order - we had to explain in broken Mandarin to the trainee cook to put the eggs into hot water, and it came back raw (he obviously didn't bother to time the eggs!). The second morning, we got fried two minute eggs (again, no-one in the whole hotel has heard of soft-boiled eggs!). And the third morning, the waitress at the club lounge finally cooked the perfect sof-boiled eggs! This is the first time in my experience that a hotel has not trained their staff how to take a soft-boiled eggs order! It is a laughable incident for us...but hopefully, not to the hotel!

My partner and I stayed here for one night after completing a tour of Hainan Island. It is part of the Singapore based Meritus hotel chain, and proved to be pretty close to Singapore quality overall. It's a large and modern hotel located just off a busy street and not too far from central Haikou or the airport.

Check-in was fast, friendly and professional. Unlike other hotels we stayed in, we had no difficulty communicating with hotel staff who all spoke English. The only negative run-in we had with hotel staff involved a trainee waitress in the lobby lounge who refused to honor the advertised happy hour prices, and informed us there was a fairly high minimum charge if we wanted to have a drink in the lounge. We chose to go elsewhere rather than argue.

The rooms, although a bit dated, are large and very comfortable with all the expected amenities of a big city hotel. The beds were very great (no rock hard Chinese mattress here). Eventhough our rooms faced a busy street, noise was not an issue at all.

The breakfast buffet was very good, with a large selection of western and Chinese dishes. One word of warning - the coffee was undrinkable, so we opted for tea instead. We didn't have any other meals in the hotel, but the menus looked promising. They were featuring Portuguese specialties in one of the restaurants, and I regret missing out on that.

The hotel in general was grand and very well maintained. The one area of dissapointment was pool facilities. The outdoor pool was under the hot sun right next to the busy street. It was very unpleasant. The indoor pool was small, cold and dark. Don't stay here if pools are important to you. The gym looked pretty good.

There wasn't very much within walking distance of the hotel, so we had to use a driver to go out for a meal, see the city, and do a bit of shopping. We found Haikou to be a clean and green city compared to many other cities in China.