Guest User
October 29, 2024
Writing that sounds awful but I think its fair, this was without doubt the worst hotel we stayed at in India. Now, some things could be because we picked the wrong days to visit, but other things point to a deeper malaise that is concerning. It all starts so well, the outside view as you sweep up the drive is very impressive; even the reception lobby looks impressive, though cracks started to show with the reception staff who seemed overwhelmed dealing with 12 people who had booked 8 rooms. The IT seemed to be having some problems which was a regular occurrence. The rooms were not particularly clean, but then again you couldn't call them filthy - just not up to standard. Ditto the bedding and towels seemed ripe for replacements. The bathrooms need ripping out and starting again they were very poor and one member of our group rejected four rooms because of mold in bathrooms while another rejected two. Ours was not as bad as that but we don't look that closely! So apart from the rooms being "tired" what else was wrong? The food was really poor, lukewarm on cold plates with not much choice. The only thing we constantly enjoyed was the masala chai tea. The bar, when you find it, is pleasant enough but was more expensive than the Taj hotel in Kolkata. The big problems however were with front of house staff who were very poor. We got up at 4 one morning to watch sunrise over the Taj Mahal and came back for a snooze only to be phoned twice by the reception to ask when we were checking out - that would be the following day. Once you can understand but twice was inexcusable. The room above us seemed to be going through some renovation and I twice had to phone reception in the middle of the night to ask them to stop drilling, which they did, but didn't stop hammering. When I complained about that they just put the phone down on me! That wasn't an isolated incident, several of the group complained about noise only to have the phone put down on them too. Then at check out, I had a rough idea at how much the bill would be so was very surprised when it came back at 3 times what I expected. Going through the bills item by item I found things I had not signed for, things which were actually shown to be another room and things that just didn't make sense. After a good 20 minutes it got close enough to the bill I expected not to keep on complaining. I still think I ended up paying for some other people's drinks though. This wasn't an isolated incident; 4 of the group rooms - so 50% had problems on check out with over stated bills ranging from 10s to 100s of pounds difference. It could be that creaky IT system but I have my doubts. The problem is this hotel is in one of the honey pot areas of India - you can actually see the Taj Mahal from some areas, and the room rate is very reasonable for Agra. This means you will get huge numbers visiting for very short periods of time. I would guess 2/3 days would be the maximum people would stay. Which in turn puts huge strai