The four venue clusters, how to get a tax invoice your finance team will accept, moving around on a work schedule without losing a morning to traffic, and the meeting etiquette that actually matters.
Beijing works well for business travellers: the metro is predictable in a way that road traffic is not, the big venues are on the subway, and almost everything can be arranged from a phone. Two things trip people up. The first is invoices — without a correctly issued tax invoice carrying your company's tax details, your expenses may simply not be reimbursed. The second is timing: a cross-town meeting at 09:00 in a taxi is a genuinely risky plan. This guide covers the venue clusters, how invoicing works, moving around on a schedule, and the etiquette that actually matters.
Know which one your meeting is in before you accept a time slot. The CBD around Guomao, served by Lines 1 and 10, holds most finance, consulting and media offices. The National Convention Centre in the Olympic Park — Lines 8 and 15 to Olympic Park station, exits E or H for the original halls and F for the second phase roughly 100 metres from the door — is the permanent home of the China International Fair for Trade in Services and hosts most large conferences. The exhibition centres are split: the older China International Exhibition Center at Jing'anzhuang in the north-east, and the much larger New CIEC out in Shunyi on Line 15. Yizhuang, on the Yizhuang line in the south-east, is the manufacturing and pharmaceutical cluster and is further out than first-time visitors expect.
A Chinese tax invoice, known as a fapiao, is the only document most finance departments will accept — a card statement or a booking confirmation is not enough. To get one you must supply two things at the moment of payment: your company's invoice title and its taxpayer identification number, both in Chinese characters. Save them in your phone and hand them over before paying, at the hotel desk, in a restaurant, in a taxi and at the courier counter. Most invoices are now electronic and arrive by email or WeChat. The rule to remember is to ask at the moment you pay: retroactively chasing an invoice after check-out is slow, and some merchants will not reopen a settled transaction.
Traffic, not distance, sets the schedule. Weekday peaks run roughly 07:30 to 09:30 and 17:30 to 19:30, and a cross-town drive that takes 25 minutes at 10:00 can take 70 at 08:30. The metro is the reliable option and every major venue sits on it. Ride-hailing through DiDi or Amap works well off-peak and can be billed to a corporate account; hotel concierges can pre-book a car with a driver for a day of back-to-back meetings, which is often cheaper than it sounds. For airports, the Capital Airport Express is fast and predictable, and Daxing is roughly an hour out on its own express line. Do not plan a meeting that needs a taxi across town during either peak.
Large hotels, international chains and big malls accept foreign cards. Small restaurants, taxis hailed on the street, print shops and most everyday merchants are WeChat Pay and Alipay only, with cash as the fallback. Set up a foreign card in both apps before you fly, and keep a few hundred yuan in cash for the first day. Corporate cards with poor mobile-wallet support are the most common cause of an awkward dinner bill.
Arrive five to ten minutes early; punctuality reads as respect, and the traffic excuse is heard constantly. Business cards are exchanged with both hands, given and received with the text facing the other person, and you are expected to actually look at the card before putting it away rather than pocketing it unseen. Address people by surname plus title until invited to do otherwise. Seniority enters and speaks first. WeChat is the default working tool, so expect to be added to a group chat and to receive documents there rather than by email. Contracts are not final until the company seal is stamped, so a signature on its own does not mean what it might at home.
Printing is easy and cheap — hotel business centres and the copy shops near any venue will produce a deck, bind it and scan back a signed copy within the hour. On connectivity, install a travel eSIM or pick up a SIM at the airport, and sort out your company VPN before you land, because it will not be installable from inside China. Same-day laundry is standard at business hotels and worth using on any trip longer than four days. Anything you need to ship home or on to the next city can usually go from the courier desk, and you will want that invoice for it.