I stayed in the Peninsula Shanghai and Amanyangyun last year. A lot of the issues I dealt with were due to lack of English speaking staff.

You can communicate with the Peninsula via WhatsApp (before you arrive in China) and WeChat (once you arrive). We were traveling with our two kids and I found that whoever was working the overnight shift would not understand our requests and state that items were unavailable. But during the daytime "normal" business hour shifts, our requests would be magically fulfilled.

At Amanyangyun, we did two activities but the hosts both could not speak English. Or when housekeeping came knocking at our door for turndown service, we told them to come back 10 minutes later as we were going to immediately depart for dinner. We learned that they didn't understand what we said when we came back from dinner and the room was not serviced.

With that said, I enjoyed both properties. The Amanyangyun is a bit of a weird one because it seems more geared as a weekend vacation spot for local Chinese. It's not a good location for seeing Shanghai and the immediate vicinity didn't seem to be interesting although I could have been missing something. I simply went because I wanted two nights to relax after having meetings in the city the week before and it served that purpose well. We stayed on property the whole time.

I also have to "somewhat" commend the Peninsula for their Rolls Royce pickup service. Our flight departure to SHA was delayed by 5 hours. Due to inclement weather in Shanghai, we flew in circles for about an hour and a half before being diverted to PVG. Then we were made to wait on the plane for almost another hour as they got paperwork for landing at a different airport done. We wondered if the car we reserved would be waiting for us or if we'd be considered a no show. When we arrived, we managed to get in touch with the hotel and after a few back and forth calls, they sent the driver to PVG (he had been waiting at SHA for 8 hours). I "somewhat" commend them because the wow experience would be tracking our flight constantly on a live basis, seeing that it was diverted to PVG and being there as soon as we walked out of arrivals. But it was still better than to be processed as a no show.