**Andaz Shanghai ITC (Xujiahui) — One-Week Stay Review | Globalist | SNA Redemption**
**The Stay & Rate**
Booked at ~$220/night. A few days before arrival, the pre-arrival guest manager reached out and I mentioned I had a Suite Night Award expiring. He proactively suggested I stay in my booked room for the first two nights, after which a suite would open up. Sure enough, when I checked availability for the adjusted dates online, the SNA went through without issue. Smooth and well-handled, a great first impression.
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**Getting There: DiDi Warning**
Heads up for anyone relying on DiDi: the hotel is not yet listed in the app. You'll need to look up the name of the previous hotel tenant that occupied the building and use that as your destination, that's the only way to get drivers to find it.
Also worth understanding the hotel's layout before your first pickup. You enter the building and take an elevator up to the lobby, which I believe is on the 12th floor. The guest rooms are actually on the floors below the lobby, so you take a second elevator down to your room. That means every time you're heading out to catch a DiDi, it's a two-elevator process: up to the lobby first, then down again to either the 1st or 3rd floor pickup point. The elevators are fast so it's not a big deal, but factor it in when your driver is waiting.
And about those pickup points: the hotel has two separate drop-off and pick-up spots, one on the 1st floor and one on the 3rd floor. The 3rd floor is the main entrance, but DiDi will seemingly randomly route drivers to one or the other. Most drivers told me they had never been to the hotel before, so don't be surprised if your car ends up at the wrong entrance. Give yourself a little extra time and be ready to communicate with your driver.
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**The Property**
Brand new and it shows, in the best possible way. No new-hotel gremlins, no half-finished finishes, no "we're still working out the kinks" excuses. Everything works, everything is polished. Rooms are beautiful, well-appointed and tasteful in a way that feels deliberately understated. Some Andaz properties, particularly in the US, compete with the W and lean into that hip, edgy vibe. This one goes in a completely different direction: low-key, refined, the kind of place that appeals to people who appreciate a very tasteful Asian modern aesthetic without it being loud about it. Classy without trying too hard.
The suite had a really cool wall display of what must have been 100+ actual 35mm film canisters, and a large vintage camera partially disassembled as a sculptural piece. Not your usual mass-produced hotel room filler art, it looked genuinely one of a kind. The kind of thing you actually stop and look at. As a Globalist I received a room upgrade on arrival and was moved into a suite once it became available.
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**Service: Genuinely Exceptional**
I travel frequently and stay at a lot of high-end properties in Asia. I've done multiple stays at the W Shanghai (my usual base), and was at the Park Hyatt Shanghai just two weeks prior. I know what excellent service looks like in this market.
This hotel has the best service I've experienced at any hotel in China. On par with or better than the Four Seasons, and a step above both St. Regis properties in Shanghai, and those are great hotels. What sets the Andaz ITC apart is that the service is fast, friendly, and genuinely polished across every touchpoint: valet, front desk, housekeeping, restaurant, you name it. Staff would run ahead to press elevator buttons. Walking into the lobby, everyone stopped to greet you. The hotel always felt quiet and uncrowded, yet there was always a full complement of attentive staff. Whoever is training and managing this team is doing an outstanding job.
One practical highlight: laundry can be dropped off as late as noon and returned by around 6pm, with excellent care. A small thing, but a big deal when you're on the road for weeks at a time.
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**The Caveats: Know Before You Go**
These aren't complaints so much as important context for Western travelers, particularly those used to internationally-facing luxury hotels.
**Language:** This is, end-to-end, a Chinese hotel catering to a Chinese clientele. Almost no one on staff spoke English, including the operator when you call down to the front desk. If you're not comfortable navigating that, adjust your expectations accordingly.
**Breakfast:** Beautiful spread, entirely Asian dishes. You can special-order eggs, but getting an omelette with cheese required a special ask, and there were no Western proteins like bacon of the kind you'd find even at the Park Hyatt across town. After two complimentary breakfasts, I stopped going. There's only so many days of plain eggs and pastries before you need a change.
**Room Service:** This is the bigger issue for Western business travelers. The room service menu is 100% Asian dishes, no pasta, no steak, not even a basic hotel burger. They offered to make fried rice as a workaround. That's it. The food looks beautiful and I'm sure it's excellent if you eat Asian cuisine, but if you're working late and craving something familiar, you're out of luck.
**Delivery Apps:** Shanghai has the most efficient food delivery ecosystem in the world, but as a foreigner you effectively can't use it. The apps are entirely in Chinese, require a Chinese bank card, and while Alipay works great for paying at restaurants, I couldn't figure out how to get it to work with the delivery apps. Even if you could navigate the interface, payment is a dead end. So delivery isn't a real option either.
**Location:** The hotel sits in what is essentially an office park. After business hours, the surrounding area is dead. The hotel entrance is elevated on the third floor with no real pedestrian infrastructure around it, you're not going to stroll anywhere. In fairness, it was cold and rainy the entire week I was there, so I wouldn't have walked anywhere regardless.
**DiDi (mostly) to the rescue:** The saving grace is that DiDi is absurdly cheap by Western standards. A "Comfort" tier ride to my office was about $4 USD. We started booking "Black" cars everywhere because they were under $10. Incredible value, though see above for the drop-off confusion at the hotel itself.
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**Bottom Line**
If you're a Chinese-speaking traveler or someone who eats Asian cuisine and doesn't need Western comfort food, this hotel is a slam dunk, arguably the best-serviced hotel in Shanghai right now. If you're a Western road warrior who relies on room service for late-night comfort food, needs English-speaking staff, or wants a Western breakfast, go in with eyes open. The service and the rooms are genuinely world-class. The experience just skews heavily local, which is either a feature or a bug depending on who you are.
