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While I'm in the airport in Guangxi and waiting to fly, Trip calls me to tell me the hotel I've booked in at "isn't licensed to take foreigners". 

I picked the hotel I spent two nights at on my way out from Jingbian so that's a load of crap that I'm not particularly interested in taking but hey, if they want to rebook me somewhere nicer, I'll accept being rebooked.

However, after thirty or forty minutes where my phone clearly has signal but I get no calls (despite Customer Service insisting that they were trying to reach me), the "only" hotel that they can find which will take me wants to ask me a bunch of nosy questions on the basis of a "new local policy" which has come out because of the "ever more serious" epidemic situation in the area¹. 

I don't so much decline to answer the questions as decline to allow them to be asked and end the call with the explicitly voiced expectation that a manager will be calling me back around 3:30, when I get to my next airport, and will be confirming where I'm staying.

No phone call while I'm at the airport in Xi'an, but—especially given that my airline tickets were purchased from them—it's possible that they've assumed I was unavailable.

I get a call in Yulin while waiting for pickup from the airport. There's a hotel that "meets my conditions". It's 5km away from my originally booked location which, in a town the size of Jingbian, quite explicitly means that it does not meet my conditions. I decline the offer to be rebooked there and say that I'll stay at my original hotel.

"But you can't," the voice on the other end of the phone tells me, "they don't have the license to accept foreigners." 

"Of course they don't," I want to respond. "No one does. It doesn't exist." But, instead, being tired and never having done this on the phone, I instead go with "I stayed at that hotel last month, so I don't know where you got that info, but you're wrong. I'm not going somewhere else unless it's a kilometer away or less."

I'm told that a supervisor will call me back before 9, but by 9:25 when I show up at my hotel, I have had no call.

"We thought you'd cancelled" the woman at the desk greets me. 

"No, why would I do that?"

"But, we have no vacancies" she says, pointing at a sign on the desk to match the one on the door. “满房” No rooms.

"That's not really my problem. I've already booked a room and paid for it."

About this time three more sets of late arriving customers all come in asking about the parking lot and a room (in a slightly different price category) is found for me, leaving them to figure out who else to try to bump instead. 

I almost feel a twinge of sympathy for whoever will be doing Night Audit and perhaps dealing with the person who gets walked, but then I remember that—even though the comments about a lack of a Foreigner License all came from Trip—the hotel didn't actually check to see if my booking had successfully been cancelled.

¹ Everywhere in China has been downgraded to "minimal concern" for over a month at this point and the last domestic outbreak of Covid was on the border with Vietnam.