Whoever thinks darjeeling is a beautiful hillstation is blind. Or maybe they were fortunate to not live within the city /mall road where the main tourist destinations like the PN Himalayan zoo or HMI are. The city is dirtier than slums of dharavi..there is open drainage everywhere, there are garbage dumps at every 1km because of which the whole city stinks. We had stayed there in April 2024 after coming from beautiful sikkim on way back to bagdogra. The hotel we booked was 10k per night but the view outside was of slums. The roads are one ways , congested. You cannot shop in this dump. The zoo was the only clean space so we spent the entire day there. As we did not even want to enter the city. We tried going to the rangeet ropeway but the stairs leading up to the ropeway were steep and stinky with garbage dump and drainage going under the stairs. So we did not attempt further.
The best hotels like Mayfair, Ramada and Elgin are all on this dirty mall road itself .
Skip darjeeling and save yourselves the expense and waste of time and utter disappointment. Try booking away from mall road darjeeling, like in Kurseong or further away from mall road such as further ahead of ghoom monastery.