Kempinski Hotel Xiamen

We thoroughly enjoyed our stay at Kempinski while visiting Xiamen with family. The rooms are spacious and very clean, love the details too. Staff are professional and were very helpful from the moment we arrived. Breakfast buffet was excellent with a huge variety of eastern / western options and local delights. Kids friendly hotel. We’d definitely stay again.

This hotel is beautiful, but has a service environment I can best describe as hostile. Rules are plentiful and enforced with vigour. Much of this, I should say, relates to travelling with children. We booked an executive floor room. Only after arrival did we learn that children are not allowed in the executive lounge free of charge (unlike any other executive/club hotel we have ever stayed). At the swimming pool, the only motion allowed is in a single direction. Swimming across the pool is forbidden and will result in verbal redress from staff. The idea of children playing and enjoying the water is foreign here. After raising some of these issues with the hotel, they did offer some accommodations - allowing our kids in the lounge for an extra night, for example. But the general hotel environment was unwelcoming, and this seemed to be institutional, not at all a question of individual staff.