Hotels in Delhi, India : My Awful Experiences

Hotels in Delhi, India, were the worst I’ve stayed in around the world. In fact I disliked them so much that I went to the airport 5 hours early just so I could leave. I briefly mentioned the start of a story in the Budget Travel Vs Luxury Travel post. Read on to find out more.

As a Recap:

India: known to be one of the cheapest places to travel in the world. Emma and I didn’t expect too much from our stay in India, however it still turned out to be much more expensive than we first thought. It was our second country. We opted to do a tour because it can be fairly tricky to navigate around and know where is safe to eat. We arrived a few days early so we did our research and tried to find a decent hotel in Delhi to stay in before we started the tour.

Hotel Delhi Height was booked through Agoda as it seemed to have better reviews than most other hotels in Delhi. Unfortunately we had issues from the start. The manager had not yet received a confirmation code of payment from the booking company. He said that our copy was not enough as he may end up out of pocket. We said that we would email them to ask them to resend it to him.

When we first arrived the room looked fairly presentable, but on closer inspection it was full of bugs and cockroaches! We opened the door and the walls practically moved. We had no running hot water, the bedding was stained, and the light fixtures were hanging off the walls. This was on top of it having construction being done in the main stairwell with no bannisters and a sheer drop to the ground floor.

Stand your ground

On our way out of the hotel the next day the manager stopped us leaving the building. He said we had not turned up to meet him at the specified time (even though we were not told we had to meet anyone) and that was not acceptable. He claimed he had not yet received payment for the room and so was demanding that we paid again. Also, Agoda is a big company and we should have had a reply within 24 hours. Emma wanted to just pay it but I didn’t (because I’m stubborn). We had already paid £30 per night (a total of £90 which in the grand scheme of things isn’t much but we were trying to SAVE money, not spend double) for this awful room and I refused to pay AGAIN.

Back up needed?

This is when he called for back-up. He made us sit down and had 5 men stand and surround us. They stood with their arms crossed trying to intimidate us into paying again. I said we would not be paying again and had proof that the money had left our account and that we had a confirmation email of payment. If he had not received the money then he would need to take it up with the company we booked it through rather than us. He showed us the computer screen and said there was no email so we were lying to him. I said he could have either deleted or moved the email from the inbox and therefore be lying to us.

Then it escalated…

He started getting incredibly defensive and rude. My fists were starting to clench with anger, but I kept my cool. He said he does not phone companies, he only emails them but because we had already emailed them then there was no point and it was too late now anyway. I said he would have to call them if he would like the money as it was out of our hands.

He still insisted that we pay again but I still insisted that we wouldn’t. He was pretty surprised at how resistant I was being. I suggested that he calls the company centre in India and he said he did not know the phone number, despite being sat in front of a computer. He could look it up but he refused, so I asked for the wifi password and we were waiting 20 minutes for the relevant information to load (the wifi was AWFUL). It wasn’t the most pleasant 20 minutes of my life.

I finally got the phone number and he agreed to call them, and I asked for it to be put on speaker phone which he did reluctantly. The operator then explained that we had paid the money and that they would re-send the confirmation email AGAIN. The manager immediately changed his tone, apologised to us and offered us a free cup of coffee (which we declined) and dispersed his team of men. We left the next day.

This is a way we dealt with our anger:

Another Experience in a Hotel in Delhi, India

Again, trying to save money, we booked to stay in a cheap hotel in Delhi, however this one was not on google maps in the right place. We thought we would save even more money by walking from one hotel to the other because it was only meant to be a 15 minute walk down the road. An hour and a half later we were still lost, sweating our butts off in the blistering heat, carrying our backpacks which felt like they were doubling in weight by the minute.

Technology had failed us

We asked locals if they knew where the hotel was and some were honest and said they didn’t know, others did that thing where they point in a random direction and hope that they’re vaguely right. They weren’t. Even the tuktuk drivers didn’t know. We ended up asking a guy on the street who took us up a really narrow steep staircase to an airconditioned travel unit (it felt like luxury) and gave us a bottle of water. We looked a right state. He called a few people and then found out where we needed to go and so we took a tuktuk there and managed to check in. Finally!

Next we were shown to our room by a man in his early 20s. The air con wasn’t working or the fan so he said he would fix it. He left and re-entered our room without knocking 4 times within 15 minutes, even after the fan was fixed, so we locked the door and then he even tried to enter again! He knocked and asked if we wanted a sim card, even though he knew we were leaving India the following day. We ended up giving him a small amount of money in case that was what he was after, just so he would leave us alone!

Scams

It turns out that there is a big chain of hotels run by the same manager in Delhi and they are all under different names. This was mentioned in the reviews of other hotels we read about but we didn’t realise this hotel was one of them until we turned up and it was actually called something different to what we had booked. The same hotel in Delhi was listed under 3 different names (probably because the reviews were so poor!). The reviews stated that the manager had made people pay again for their accommodation and it was a scam. If you plan on staying in any hotels in Delhi just be aware of the scams and make sure you do some research before you book a place.