Hotel work (non-teaching) can become pretty good...but one does start out at the stinky bottom and work oneself half nuts to get there.
English teaching gigs like the one you describe can be pretty sweet, though, with a little luck. A hotel suite isn't a room...it can be pretty comfortable, and you shouldn't have the privacy/intrusion problems one can encounter at a uni or public school. The "office hours" likely entail being around to coach/proof/etc. plus some freedom to walk around the hotel and interact with the staff. (I've taught a lot of hotels, and I tend to like hotel workers. They seem to be a bit more fun than managers/engineers/businesspeople.
) You may be able to negotiate meals- but they'll be in the staff cafeteria, not the buffet.
A great hotel is a wonderful thing...working conditions can be primo. 'Course, it helps if the Training Manager is sane...and many are not...
I think a good working figure for Harbin in this scenario might be 5500-7000 per month.
Usually, the worst things about hotels are not the conditions or pay or anything like that. The big challenges include:
- It's almost impossible to find hotel-specific textbooks that don't totally suck. I gave up and wrote my own.
- Hotels are chronically short-staffed, and it may be difficult for your students to find much time and energy for English. Also, although hotels shell out a lot of money for luxury touches for guests, they are incredibly cheap MoFos when it comes to everything else. Many hotel workers have hard, dirty jobs that they regard as short term (ie non-career-related), for which they get paid very little and endure poor living and working conditions...which means that while they may like you and your class, they can find it very hard to get motivated to study English.
- Hotels often expect (and really need) insanely fast results from English training, regardless of initial level of the students. Many hotels in China routinely send recruiting expeditions out to poor hinterland provinces, literally driving to the cabbage fields to recruit young people with little education and few other prospects, willing to work cheap in exchange for a ticket out to almost anywhere except where they are now. These people are too often expected to be working effectively as waiters and waitresses in 5-star Western restaurants within a few weeks or months. Many of the people under the greatest pressure to learn English (foodservice is a nightmare for this!) are also those least equipped to have a real shot at it.
- Hotels are very challenging communications environments, even among native speakers. They provide vast numbers of services and amenities, and are notorious for weird questions/requests and fussy, demanding, volatile guests. Some of the vocabulary, such as in foodservice, is quite difficult and specialized. Many of the things done and seen and sold in hotels are to the students utterly foreign in concept...much less the language.
I really like working in hotels. But it can be very challenging and not a little frustrating.