BUDGET TRAVEL to China

BUDGET TRAVEL to China
Olympic-Sized Discounts Coming to Beijing This Fall

The world's most certain travel prediction is that the hotels of Beijing will be full of vacancies by Aug. 29 of this year.

The summer Olympics will have run from Aug. 8-24. Allowing the athletes, coaches, spectators, journalists and television crews five days to pack up and board planes home, you'll then discover empty hotels and restaurants. So many new properties are opening just prior to the Olympics - and so much single-minded attention will have been devoted to the period of the Olympics - that these new lodgings can't possibly have secured much of a continuing clientele for the subsequent period.

How many new rooms will have been built for the Olympics? A final tabulation shows the figure to exceed 15,000 - a giant increase in Beijing's hotel capacity. There will be major discounting and numerous deals.

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Chances are excellent that they will have favorable rates and almost endless capacity to accommodate an autumn booking.

Or you can consider making a purely independent trip to Beijing, whose tourism today operates almost exactly as it does in Western Europe. You simply contact a hotel by e-mail and request reservations.

In the period immediately following the conclusion of the Olympics, many of the city's deluxe hotels undoubtedly will be charging no more than $175 a room. The first-class hotels will be down to their usual $120 or so per room, tourist-class hotels to $75 a room. And the new budget hotels - Home Inn, 7 Days Inn (a take-off on the familiar U.S. brand), Jinjiang Inn, Motel 168 (yes, that's their name!) and Hanting Hotel - will be down to charging less than $50 a night for a double room, including breakfast for two.

In fact, if you search Google, you'll immediately see that some new Chinese economy hotels are featuring promotions of 99 yuan ($14) per room per night for the post-Olympics period. Many of these budget lodgings are now operating in and around Beijing, including properties in the centrally located Wangfujing area within walking distance of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square.

As a final alternative, you can make a reservation for your first night, and then simply wander over to other hotels to bargain for a good rate. If I were on an independent trip to China in the autumn, I would tell the room clerk (most of whom speak English): "I am looking for a room costing no more than (and here name a cheap but respectable price) per night." The chances are considerable that he or she will respond with: "It just so happens we have such a room."

It's important to make the trip soon. The Chinese yuan, which traded at a rate of about 8 to the dollar some 18 months ago, has now gradually strengthened to a rate of 7.24 to the dollar. And the Chinese seem committed to a policy of continuing slow depreciation of the yuan (although it is still vastly overpriced, even at the 7.24 level).

In this era of world history, China comes close to being an almost indispensable trip for thoughtful Americans wanting to experience or witness world trends. Since the Yuan certainly will be far more expensive in 2009 than in 2008, the time to go is now.