Thursday, December 14, 2006

airdash to mumbai

Had to fly to Mumbai for a story this week and was stunned by the quality of hotels on offer. Everything was booked, and even two-stars were demanding $85 a night and up. What has the world come to? Thank God for the Bentley. Here's hoping that Homi and the gang don't decide that if everybody else can begin to claim amenities that don't exist to jack up rates, so can they.

And, incidentally, where are those "budget hotel chains" that were announced with such fanfare a few years back? So far, they've opened in backwaters like Bhubaneshwar, where, no doubt, a decent place to kip was lacking, but so was demand, Bangalore and Pune. OK, fine on the latter two. But guys, if nobody's pointed out a few 2-stars in Mumbai and Delhi that are ripe for takeover, you need to hire an outside consultant.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

And to top it off, none of these hotels which charge you a bomb offer what i would call a basic amenity in today's world- high speed internet connectivity. Also heard that these smaller hotels don't have a generator support to back-up india's erratic power supply situation!!

shyam said...

After being shacked up in all sorts of places around Bandra, last time the office lads booked us into a faily decent place, called Shubhangan, which was worth the money they charged. Clean place, nice service and so on. It is in the Khar Danda area, not the best of neighborhoods, but the place more than makes up for it.

To add to anon's comment, they had wifi there, but the signal was so weak, it could not go anywhere beyond allocating the lappy an IP address. I won't envy them though, considering the weirdo architecture these places tend to have, every floor would have to have at least 3 routers per floor for the signal to be anywhere close to decent.