Well, not sure where to begin. I thought my mind would have coolled down a bit hence writing after almost 20 days of my trip. We were on our annual vacation and meticulously chose Ooty and kodaikanal and worked out every detail, selecting holiday inn in ooty(19 - 21 aug)and carlton in kodai. Assuming this was one of the best available in the city and ofcouse with the brand name, we obviosly expect a basic level of standard that a 4/5 star property(not sure who rated that) should have. We were sadly mistaken!
From the minute we checked in and entered the room and I decided to take a quick shower to relax from the tiring journey from kodaikanal to ooty. I tried turning on the tap and the next thing I see is there is no tap! it came out in my hand.the reception folks instead of suggesting to change the room decided to send a plumber. That took a long while before a "kaam chalaoo" arrangement was done. After having our meal(which I will talk abt later) we switched off the lights and dozed off thinking "tomorrow will be a new day".wishful thinking I guess!.the room had a wardrobe light on and its switch wont work.!
I didnt really have the enery in the middle of the night, so thought we’ll manage somehow till morning before complaining. It was quite cold and I adjusted the A/c temperatur to almost 28 degrees but the room just wudnt get warm.well all in all I somehow managed to pass that night, tired, sleepless, cold and very very angry!
In the morning I decided to hav a word with the duty a manager. Here’s waht he had to say - "oh, the a/c, I know, it doesnt work, we have been just circulating fresh air!, I’ll send a room heater in your room.". Yea right! and I am suppossed to get day dreams when I check into your hotel that its just a/c= "air cooled"
Next was the food, no great shakes, and certainly not value for money. The salads had no names nor taste either. We preffered to have our lunches in a restaurant by the name nahar, which served pretty good food. The only solace was the beauty of the hill stations which we saw during the day, saw no other reason to call it a "relaxing trip" and wasnt sure what more surprises wait for us in the evening at the hotel.
As expected, there was no heater in the evening, we called up again to remind them. An electrician came to fix the wardrobe light when we were actually tired roaming the whole day out. He took more than an hour to fix it, the problem being the the same electrician had shown some creativity earlier with the bulb which now had a direct connection with the mains and attained "immortal"status!. Anyways another kaam chalaooo "switch hanging with a wire" arrangement was done!
Tomorrow will be a new day.or not? It was raining and since the hotel is at quite a height we were kind of left stranded, so we thought why not use the reacreation facilities?.Bad idea.! "Enter the dungeon". The name of their reacreation area(supposedly) is "Aliens" which is a disc+ game area. It was filled with a stench of cigarettes, littered, the TT table was dirty, scratched and dimly lit(lounge lights for TT?.somebody help me).and the irony was the place also had a dart board.watch your eyes people!.an hour later we were told things have been fixed and usable when we complained again.well nothing had changed.I agree its a test of patience!.we decided to just sleep off the rest of the trip and say good riddance to this royally sced hotel soon, but will certainly give the feedback to the GM before leaving.
The check out was painful again, we had to produce allsort of evidence to show the people the 10% discount that was given on the "indulge"package. The apparently didnt have a record of the discount given by the booking team and they obviosly could not wake them at 6 am when we are leaving. The fear of missing my flight did not scare me so much as staying another day in this god forsaken place. When we gave the feedback, we were told the GM is not in the hotel and the duty manager did not care to meet us and sent someone else to gather the feedback. We did write the details of our quandry in their feedback form and we were promised it will be delivered to the Gm only. Havent heard from anyone yet.
he list is long, and their are more feathers to add to their cap, but the bottom line is - please decide on some other hotel if you are thinking about this. If you still decide on choosing this property, you have my best wishes! Hope this helps.