How can I find serviced apartments for a family?
 

We're headed to Beijing this spring, for five nights, with 7 people (the youngest is two). I see plenty of hotels that claim to accommodate only two or three per room, so it's difficult to use the online tools.

I see people suggest airbnb's are legally suspect, so I've crossed those off. How do you book serviced apartments? Do they typically offer nightly or weekly rates? Can you find rates online anywhere, or is it basically negotiated?

I don't have experience with serviced apartments in Beijing, but I know Citadines have a couple of properties there - you can at least check their rates online ....https://www.citadines.com/en/index.html

Grand Hyatt serviced apartments are good.

Check Lee Gardens apartments. It gets tons of good reviews and is well located for tourism: Lee Garden Service Apartments Beijing - Offcial Website ? Online Reservation

For future reference: Our family booked rooms at the Ascott Riverside Garden Service Apartments, with the Citadines chain. It opened in 2017. Rooms are gorgeous and had tons of space, at what seemed like incredibly good rates compared to others. We had the breakfast room to ourselves most mornings, and it was quite a spread. The hotel adjoins a mall with a nice grocery store and a McDonalds, so the family was happy.

Two hiccups worth noting:

(1) I reserved a three bedroom unit well in advance. About a week out, they wrote and said that a long-term tenant had renewed their lease, and that no three-bedroom units were available. They gave us a two-bedroom unit and a one-bedroom unit, but "close together" was kind of a stretch.

(2) We arrived in late March and the room heat was on full blast. 30C/86F. We called downstairs, and an engineer appeared at 11pm with a laser thermometer. He pressed some buttons but we sweat through the night at 30C. The next morning, they turned off the HVAC units in the room, and offered us a key for the balcony windows (and asked for us to sign a waiver). That made all the difference.

The only other downside is that it's about 45 minutes to Tiananmen by car. But I took a little of the money I saved on rooms and hired Joe Qiao (joe-service.com) to ferry us around town. He'd be a bargain at twice the price.