The Howard Johnson Hawana Resort is in Conghua, Guangzhou. It is about an hour from Guangzhou city by taxi. The hotel rooms and lobby areas are very nice. The staff is pleasant and go out of their way to assist guests. But it is quite a way from any city or town and without speaking Chinese we were at a disadvantage. The hotel’s web-site said it was between 20 and 30 minutes to the hotel from the airport, but our taxi driver had difficulty finding the hotel and took more than an hour after going almost to downtown Guangzhou. This was not the fault of the hotel. We booked through Priceline, but Priceline did not forward payment to the hotel. The reception / front desk had no record of our reservation at all, but the hotel worked with us most professionally to accommodate us. Alice Wong was the Assistant Manager on duty. She was a lovely young woman that spoke very good English. She was called almost every time we had a question to be sure the responses were correct. The hotel required a hold on our credit card for our expected length of stay but did not charge our card until we checked out.

Our room had a king-size bed with free broadband and nice bath amenities. This hotel is almost an hour to Guangzhou by cab at about $20 USD each way, Conghua is about 20 minutes away but we’re not sure about public transportation and/or the cab costs. The indoor pool is on the fifth floor and is not heated. The outdoor pool is very large but was closed in January when we were there for cleaning. The Business Center staff spoke little English but tried to help or called Ms. Wong if they were not sure what we needed.

The biggest problem we had was that there was very little nearby to get a meal outside of the hotel. We found two small restaurants across the street. In the hotel, there was a conference or convention going on. One restaurant was closed and the other was reserved for a private party for the conference. The hotel set up a few tables in the lounge for dinner for anyone else. The “western” restaurant was open each morning for breakfast. We ate breakfast there each morning of our stay because there were no alternatives that we found. It was about $3 each. The food was about the same each morning. Most of the food was Chinese with few western choices.

We would only recommend this hotel if you wanted to stay in the resort (pools looked nice, but we were there in winter). We understand there is a shuttle when the Canton Fair is going on, but we were tourists.