Hotel (VIP Service)Culture

There are a few things Guangdong province has plenty of…people, factories, and hotels. These aren’t the normal hotels you are thinking of, but hotbeds for prostitution activity. As a foreigner, you can be expected to be a target of prostitutes at the bar but I avoid these women at all costs, and they are looked down upon from all sides of society.

One thing I have found to be more acceptable however, is to go south to one of the hotels in Dongguan and pay for their “service.” You may ask, what’s the difference between paying a girl at the bar versus going to a hotel and paying for a girl. The answer I got was…professionalism.

I have a circle of local Cantonese friends, and they have all grown up with this “hotel culture” and find it acceptable. These particular friends all come from respectable families, work at some of the biggest companies in China, would never smoke weed (I’ve asked them multiple times), yet believe there is nothing wrong with going to these hotels and enjoying a few hours of debauchery.

Also, it should be noted that out of all my Chinese friends, it is only the local Cantonese guys that participate in this activity. My previous roommate is from Sichuan province, and when I asked him would he ever go to a hotel for some “special service” he said that he hates this type of activity, and he would NEVER pay for a woman. I asked a few of my other friends who come from the North, and their response was very similar.

Anyway, so I was at dinner the other night with some of these guys, and they are in the process of telling me about one of the hotel excursions they recently went on. “You are seated in a private room and given a menu, where they have a list of all the services they offer. It’s so professional!”

The word they kept emphasizing was “professional” because they were so impressed with the level of service. (According to numerous reports from McKinsey, the service industry is going to have the most growth in the near future for China.) My friends added that you can basically buy a girl for about 800RMB and do just about anything you want to her. This does not include the price of the hotel room that usually costs about 200 or 250RMB. So total spent for the evening is roughly 1,000RMB.

I assume the operation works like this: The hotel management wants to “flip” hotel rooms quickly and capitalize on the fact that the rooms will only be in use for a few hours. They are flipping hotel rooms for 250 a pop all day long and police don’t disrupt the operation because many of them are customers themselves or the hotel is protected by the mafia.

The girls can earn a lot of money by Chinese standards because 800RMB for a few hours of work is very good for them, especially considering that the majority of them girls are from the countryside.

The customers are left happy because they got their sexual urges fulfilled and when you go with a group of friends I assume there is some camaraderie involved as well. These guys will NEVER go to the hotel alone…it is very much a group activity.

After giving me all the details about what happened with each girl, they began asking if I would accompany them on their next conquest. With a wave of peer pressure demanding me to join them, I was able to dodge a bullet by refusing. My excuse...if they can’t smoke weed with me, I couldn’t join them at the hotel.

I find this whole hotel culture to be very fascinating, but I really have no interest in paying for sex; I just better find another excuse to not go with them when I finally convince them to smoke their first joint.