Business trips and hospitality

Sunrise :View from a hotel room

I am back from an official trip and have written a long note to our Facilities Head complaining about my experience at the hotel where the facilities team had booked my stay .When will companies realise that ordinary employees just need a clean bed and healthy meals while away on official trips in major cities. Five star hotels may not always be the right choice for ordinary business travellers. Yet many companies have an unhealthy fascination for providing so called five star luxuries in the garb of employee health and safety care rules. Many organisations have annual contracts with several such hotels in the country where rooms are booked for official tours. Typically on an overnight journey an employee checks in late in the evening or at night .Sometimes before he or she realises what the hotel and the room looks like he/she gets busy with other things or is ready to hit the bed after a long tiring day. Next morning from the breakfast table he usually moves straight to the workplace or venue to attend  long often extended sessions only to come back late in the evening or at times very late in the night ,if  he decides to go out with colleagues or friends. In cities like Delhi where hotel rates are high eventually the company ends up paying huge amounts for unutilised facilities.

Used to a very ordinary lifestyle  I find staying at five star hotels a pain rather than a luxury. Fortunately I do not have to travel much hence the discomfort is manageable. Whenever I have to stay I dread eating that terrible hotel food and I also dread sleeping on those unfamiliar beds. I am a small woman and the pillows are almost large enough to rest half of my body .The bed covers are so tightly tucked in that getting in and getting out of the bed is a huge struggle. I find the rooms with fixed windows equally claustrophobic specially if the AC is malfunctioning. The bathrooms with their numerous fittings and fixtures can be equally puzzling. I remember staying in a room with a bathroom made of see-through glass and no lockable door attached to it. As a result you could see the insides of the room and bathroom from both sides with free access to the bathroom at any point of time even if it was being used at that point of time. The only saving grace was that I was staying alone in that room and so did not have to spend anxious moments whenever I was inside that glass cubicle. I was told the hotel had been designed by a British architect. No idea why a foreigner was engaged to do a job when 80% of the customers were Indians.

Sometimes you also have pleasant and unpleasant surprises in store for you .Once a hotel had sent a six door luxury car to pick us up from the airport .This was part of the deal and at no extra cost.  At another hotel I had a very strange and funny experience. I was greeted by a rat that was resting on a pillow on top of the bed, when I came back to my room in the evening after a day’s session. It must have been unwell because it waited patiently in the same position till I got the hotel staff to take it away. I later discovered that it had finished off all the candies kept in my travel bag. Fortunately it had spared the bag from mutilation.