Last week I stayed one night in the Jinglun Hotel in Beijing and was surprised to see their phones. The hotel had in-room phones with large touch screens, I had never came accross these before. But the most interesting aspect was that they showed advertising on the screen. At first only on the right side of the touch pad, but after a while the whole screen was taken over by 30 second (or even longer) TV commercials! It was like having a second TV screen in your room, but one you cannot turn off – at least I did not figure out how to do that.
I found it quite annoying actually, what gives the hotel the right to spam me with commercials even inside my hotel room? For me that’s enough reason not to stay there again (the other reason is that I had a room on the Jianguomenwai Dajie side, which gets very noisy early in the morning). At first I was afraid I would have a lit-up screen next to me the whole night while sleeping, but luckily the screen turned itself off when it’s dark in the room. So maybe the trick to hide from the ads is to close the curtains during daytime and make sure all lights are turned off. Although the phones look nice, to me this is a big FAIL for the management of the Jinglun Hotel in Beijing.
Amazing. There is really absolutely NO end to where we’ll find advertising next. It seems to me in China there’s no grasp of the fact that you may be reaching a NEGATIVE effect if you’re too insistant… but hey, everyone’s trying their luck…
Solution – Scissors.
I agree; just cut the f*cker.
You’ll see this sort of phone almost in every hotel you go! (in Beijing)
First time I saw it in a Beijing hotel, we probably stay in different hotels.
oh, I used a similar looking phone about 10 years ago in a skiing resort in austria. it was a bosch phone but the big plus: it was ready for isdn internet. a good idea and I loved to check my emails with it 🙂 10 years ago a really good solution.
Did the Austrian phone have video ads on it as well? That was the special thing about it for me, and the reason I blogged about it (special in a negative sense!).
I will add this to my list of “Examples in China of media in places where there shouldn
This is very typical feature of Chinese: lack of tact, of proportion. In other words, “quality”. Chinese do not waste time and momentum asking philosophical questions *themselves*, they simply effectively try to push *the others.* In my long-term opinion (my first time in China was some 16 yrs ago) this difference in their perception will bring even more troubles in future. At the practical level, I can understand your tactful approach, however, after all these years in China, I accomodated to these ways and if someone treats me like this, he just gets back only the same caliber from me. Every electrical gadget on this planet still *must* have a cable to it, right, and actually, we do not need hotel phones in these days anymore, right? Yes, sounds little bit stupid when being a civilised guest in a classy hotel, but what can you do if you do not want to be brutally exploited by someone whose main feature is nothing but a lack of any civility and a sense of proportion?