A month ago my friend, Khushnooma Kapadia, marketing supremo at Marriott Hotels, asked me to come to the JW Marriott Golfshire and speak to Marriott general managers about my experiences at hotels. Then, last week, Richa Sharma, who looks after communications for ITC Hotels (whom I have nicknamed Speedy because of her super-efficient ways) asked me to do much the same thing for ITC general managers at Delhi’s Maurya Hotel.
I enjoyed both conversations, though I have no idea how bored the poor general managers were, having to listen to my telling them stuff they probably already knew.
But on the grounds that it pays to spread the pain, I am now going to recycle my so-called insights here. The hotel general managers have already suffered. Now it’s your turn.
Housekeeping
Everyone in hotels will tell you how housekeeping is the most important part of hotels. What they won’t tell you is how, over the years, housekeeping standards have deteriorated so much that it is now the biggest weakness in Indian hotels.
There is a simple way of telling how good or bad housekeeping is. When you enter your room, head straight for the bathtub and turn the water on. Eight times out of 10, the water will spurt out of the hand shower and drench you.
There is a reason for this.
Housekeeping staff put the hand shower on to clean the tub. Once they finish, they are supposed to turn the shower off so that the water flows from the tap. They hardly ever do that. The shower remains on and drenches any guest who uses the tub.
It’s a small thing (if you do not mind getting drenched) but it indicates a) how casually the staff take their jobs and b) how little supervision there is.
Then there are the real irritants. Cleaning is often sloppy; there will be dust and dirt under tables and chairs, water glasses and tea cups will be cleared and never replaced, coffee machines will never be filled with water and your possessions will be hidden away, so that the room looks clean even if you can’t find anything afterwards.
Reception/ Front office
Is there anything worse than getting off a long flight, braving the drive to the hotel and then having to make inane conversation with a receptionist who doesn’t really care how you answer his/her questions, but has been instructed to keep talking to guests ‘to make them feel welcome’?
The famous British restaurateur Jeremy King told staff at his Beaumont hotel in London that this was nonsensical. “When someone walks in and goes to reception, why are we asking whether they have a reservation? What percentage of people turn up at a five-star hotel without a reservation?“
Furthermore, he said, “I hate to be asked whether I have had a good journey. If I feel the need to share the information, it’s at my own behest not yours. I don’t want to be asked whether I have been at the hotel before – you should know that automatically.”
Everything Jeremy writes is also true of Indian hotels, only more so.
Lighting/Gadgetry
More money than you can imagine is wasted by hotels on specialist designers. There is always an expensive lighting designer, whose basic prescription is always the same: Light the room so dimly that people stumble around in the darkness. If there is a space for luggage, then light it so badly that nobody can find anything in their suitcases. If there is a mirror in the dressing area, make sure the light is so dim so that guests can never see what they look like.
Designers will offer ridiculous but vaguely plausible explanations for all this: Guests want soft light, overhead lights will prevent them from relaxing, low lighting will make the room look better, etc. Jargon like ‘luxe levels’ will be employed to add credibility to this nonsense.
Nobody will say, “Guests have overhead lights at home and like them and they do not live in dingily lit houses. So why make them pay thousands of rupees a night for the dubious privilege of living in the dark at hotels?”
Even worse will be the switches. They will be hard to find and at night if you want to put them off before sleeping, the only easy option will be to use the master. But the master will also turn off the bathroom light, which you may want to keep on, should you need the loo at night.
This is not as much of a nuisance as the bathroom fittings. The shower will be like the dashboard on a space ship. The bathtub will be equally complicated and fitted out at needless expense. No guest will be able to figure out how to do something as basic as having a quick bath.
Television
Unless there is an election or a war, I see no reason to watch TV in real time at home. This holds true when I am in a hotel too. If I want to be entertained, I watch a streaming service.
You would think that hotels would have realised this by now. But no. They still pride themselves on offering 54 channels in 12 languages, none of which anyone watches.
At more and more hotels, you can now mirror your own devices on the TV or sign into a streaming service; but only in theory. In practice, it will be hard to switch to streaming and you will have to call a TV technician to your room. This will take time, and when the man they have described as a TV technician arrives he will take at least 15 minutes to figure out what to do and often he will need to call someone else to help him.
Cars
In the old days, hotels would rob you blind on inflated phone charges. This attracted regulatory intervention, and in any case, the widespread use of cell phones means that hardly anyone uses hotel phones now.
The new scam is car charges. At one hotel, when they heard I was going out for lunch, they offered to arrange a car. I took their car, went to lunch and was back earlier than the five hours that was the minimum required for using the car.
When I checked out the next day, I noticed that the car cost ₹30,000 (including taxes) for that one short trip. As my lunch destination was only 20 min away, this seemed like an awful lot of money. But this what the hotel charged routinely, I gathered. As I had not bothered to ask what the cost would be when they offered to arrange the car, I guess it was my own fault.
But ₹30,000? It is a lot of money.
More
I have much more to say. But I will save that for next time!
From HT Brunch, October 3, 2026
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