Shanghai luxury hotels go half price

Want to check out the growing number of luxury Shanghai hotels but can’t afford the price tag? Think again. 

According to Jiefang Daily online, Shanghai hotels are finally catching up with their international counterparts and offering rooms on opaque hotel booking services for as little as RMB 500 a night. 

Cheap? Clearly not -- for cheap check out the new Shanghai capsule hotel -- but that’s a big discount for the RMB 1,000-plus price tags you’d normally encounter at the city’s high-end locales. 

• More on CNNGo: You'll have to drag us out of these 5 hotel suites

First introduced in the United States, opaque hotel booking systems guarantee deep discounts on luxury hotel rooms. The catch: customers don’t know which hotel they’ll stay at except the general location, before they enter credit card details. 

Priceline and Hotwire are currently the two biggest online platforms providing this service, but Shanghai-based Ctrip is now also getting in on the game. 

Ctrip recently launched a new campaign called “Secret Discounted Rooms” offering essentially opaque hotel booking services in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Sanya.

The promotion ends on Feb 28.

Most of the Shanghai hotels participating in the Ctrip service are four- or five-star venues, and prices are generally 50 percent off, ranging from RMB 200 to RMB 900 after the discount. 

Shi Yinlai, the director of operations for Ctrip’s hotel business, said that in China, the promotion was targeted at those "sensitive to prices and flexible about brands." 

• More on CNNGO: Shanghai hotels rise out of Expo dust

Although it’s nice to think local hotels are offering these kinds of discounts out of the goodness of their hearts, overcapacity after the Shanghai 2010 Expo might be a better explanation. 

Diyi Caijing Daily reports that prices for budget Shanghai hotels have gone down 40 to 60 percent and the occupancy rates for some high-end hotels are down by 30 percent since the Expo closed in the fall of 2010.