Destination guides
Seven focused neighbourhood and attraction guides — from the Bund to Zhujiajiao water town — covering what's actually worth your time, how to get there and what to watch out for.
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About Visit Shanghai
Visit Shanghai is an independent travel guide for the world's most populous city — built for the traveller who wants to work out where to stay and what to actually do without reading thirty blog posts first.
What this site is
Shanghai is a big, fast-changing city, and most of the English-language advice about it is either a decade old or a wall of photographs. We keep things short and specific: each guide answers one question, and the comparisons put the real alternatives next to each other so you can pick and move on.
Everything is organised around the two decisions that shape a Shanghai trip — which part of town to stay in, and how to spend your limited days here. Start with a destination guide, check the matching comparison, then book.
What you'll find here
Side-by-side comparisons
Where to stay, which observation deck, which airport, which day trip. Each comparison lays the options out in one table so you can decide in a minute rather than an evening.
See comparisonsTrip planning basics
Where to base yourself, the best months to visit, how to handle airports, metro, payments and SIM cards, and how to find flights without overpaying.
Open the travel guideHow the site is funded
Visit Shanghai earns a commission when you book through our partner links — hotels, flights, tours, airport transfers and eSIMs — at no extra cost to you. Booking through us costs the same as going direct; the partner simply pays us out of their margin.
That means we never get to choose your hotel or set your price, and we don't take payment for where something appears in a guide or comparison. Rankings are ordered by what we think suits most travellers, not by who pays. Full details are in our affiliate disclosure.
Before you book
Prices, opening hours, ticket rules and transport timetables in Shanghai change constantly — sometimes with little warning. Treat the figures in our guides as planning ranges, and confirm the live price and opening time on the provider's own page before you commit. Where a guide flags something as seasonal, ticketed or ID-dependent, take that seriously: it's the kind of detail that ruins a day if you get it wrong.
Found something out of date? We'd rather hear it from you than leave it up — the quickest way to flag it is through the booking page you were on, so we can see exactly which guide and which partner were involved.
Jump straight in
- Pick a base in where to stay.
- Check the season in when to go.
- Sort the practicalities with the travel guide.
- Compare the big choices in compare.
- Every page is listed in the sitemap.