Staying near the Bund is genuinely convenient, but near the Bund is not the row along the water: the blocks immediately behind the promenade are mostly historic bank and office buildings still in institutional use, so rooms there are scarce and expensive, and the areas you can actually book sit a few blocks inland or one or two metro stops away. What you buy is walking to the promenade at dawn and after dark, and a central position for the old town and Nanjing East Road; what you give up is price, room size for the money, everyday eating and shopping immediately around, and the crowd outside at peak times. Anyone happy to pay for being able to walk to the river at any hour and untroubled by a small room is well served here; tight budgets, light sleepers and anyone who wants their meals at street level are better off in People's Square, Jing'an or the former French Concession.

There is no single city-wide rule. Hotels in China are required to register foreign guests with the local police at check-in, and a property that cannot complete that process — often a small budget hotel or guesthouse — may turn a foreign guest away. The reliable approach is to book a listing that explicitly accepts foreign guests, contact the property directly before paying if you are unsure, and carry your passport and any registration slip.

In Shanghai none of the three words tells you what you will actually get. What decides the experience is whether the property can register foreign guests, whether there is a 24-hour front desk, and how check-in is arranged. Hotels are effortless but small and costly; apartments buy space and a kitchen but vary in quality and need the handover pre-arranged; a guesthouse trades privacy, soundproofing and English for a host and a neighbourhood. For a first short trip take a hotel; a longer stay or a family justifies an apartment; a guesthouse is a character trade-off, not a saving.

Shanghai hotel rates are made by demand landing on the same supply in a very short window, not by the weather: the National Day holiday week, the Lunar New Year travel period, the summer school holidays, the autumn trade-fair season and the days when a large exhibition or event lands in the city are all peaks, and trade fairs are the sharpest because the demand falls on the whole city's stock at once. The loosest windows are the weeks before Spring Festival, the stretch after the October holiday, and midweek outside fair dates. The exact dates move every year, so check that year's holiday arrangements and fair calendar before booking.

Most Shanghai hotels are fine with children, and what goes wrong is usually not unfriendliness but assumptions that do not carry over: a room has a stated maximum occupancy, whether a child counts towards it and is charged depends on age, and each property sets its own rule. Confirm the occupancy limit, the bed configuration, a cot, the window situation and the pool directly with the property before you book, and keep the reply in the booking platform's message history.

Usually yes: the wifi connects, it is often quick, and the connection itself is a real one. What tends not to work is what a foreign visitor expects to reach through it, since a set of foreign sites and apps is unreachable on an ordinary hotel network and the list shifts over time. Anyone who depends on a particular service should sort out the route before flying.

Violent crime is not the risk in a Shanghai hotel. What costs travellers a day is ordinary: valuables left in the room, a listing that looks like a hotel but is an unlicensed short let, the deposit card at check-in, and the fire stair you never looked at. Deal with those four and the rest is much like staying in any large city.