Using the amazing free transfer service with China Eastern!
This post is to show my appreciation for China Eastern, as well as to help any future people wanting to do the same thing I did.
Yesterday I flew from Osaka, Japan to Amsterdam, The Netherlands with a 14 hour long layover in Pudong (Shanghai), China. China Eastern (as well as China Southern) both offer a transfer service, in which they offer a hotel service for your layover completely free of charge. I was nervous at first as I had never been to China, nor did any of the Chinese payment apps (they use to pay for everything) work on my phone/with my bank account. I was somewhat afraid I would get stranded without any money. However it turned out great!
The process:
Requesting the free hotel was quite easy! You have to log into their (incredibly dated and terribly poor) website and simply go to the transfer service page and press request. For me the page would crash 3 times, the verification code text would sometimes not arrive (making logging in impossible at times) but I did get there in the end. Within 10 seconds a page opened with a QR code, an adress of a hotel and a message that said "transfer status: unused". I had no idea what this meant, but apperantly it meant that the hotel was booked for me and all I had to do was show the QR code at check-in. Up next, how do you get to the hotel? Well apperantly they had already organized this along with the booking of the hotel. The moment I landed in China and stepped out of the plane there was a woman waiting for me with a sign, she escorted me through customs all the way to a shuttle bus (after I had to wait for roughly 20 minutes for it to arrive). Once at the hotel I checked in and the women at the counter were very clear: You will be picked up at 9am, breakfast is available from 6:30 until 9am.
The hotel was awesome! My trip to japan was 4 weeks and the hotel in China (Pudong) was by far the most luxurious one I had stayed at throughout my entire trip. It was a 4 star hotel, in which I got a hotelroom to myself that was roughly 3 times the size of my studio apartment in Amsterdam with a luxurious interior. The breakfast was really great, just a really wonderful buffet of both western and chinese kitchens.
The next morning they picked me up at 9am after I had eaten breakfast and walked around the neighbourhood (which was lovely). Arrived at the airport 3 hours prior to my flight, flew back home and grabbed my checked-in luggage from back in Japan.
I can really highly recommend flying with China Eastern and using their free layover/ transfer service.
Hopefully this post helps somebody out, I know I really needed to read this before I flew out as I was really quite nervous about the uncertainty (was the hotel actually booked? how was I gonna get there? How much cash should I take to China?)