ABSTRACT
This chapter employs an auto-ethnographic approach to present the lived experiences with 14 economy hotels in China by the first author of this book. From 2 to 18 July 2010, the author travelled to China to conduct a field study on economy hotels. He went to Shenzhen as the first stop city in mainland China and started his observations with the hotels in which he stayed as a guest. Afterwards, he travelled from Shenzhen to Guangzhou, and then to Wuhan, Zhengzhou, Beijing, and Shanghai before returning to Shenzhen to take his flight back to Australia from Hong Kong International Airport. In each mainland Chinese city he visited during the trip, he stayed in 2–3 economy hotels and wrote his observational field notes for each hotel. Altogether, he observed 14 hotels which represented all the top ten economy hotel chain brands as listed in the China Economy Hotel Survey published by the China Hotel Association (2009).
