Hotel ups and downs

15th February 2011

Still trying to decide whether to like our hotel or not.

When we arrived yesterday it looked lovely, but my hackles immediately went up when we asked for WiFi and they said it was 50,000rp per hour. That’s £3.50 which would be steep even in London. To my way of thinking, when you spend more on a hotel (this is the most expensive place we’ve stayed after Cathedral Peak Hotel in South Africa) you expect to relax and be surrounded with convenience. We have nice toiletries in our room, we have plenty of free bottles of water, there’s a lovely swimming pool, they scatter flowers on the bed every day and we get a good breakfast.

So why try and squeeze money out with internet charges? Internet access is no longer a “special feature” in a hotel, it should be as ubiquitous as the hotel pool. How much per hour for a swim?

Anyway, the hotel is lovely. Our bungalow is relaxing, it’s twenty paces from the pool and another ten to the sea, and the restaurant rather eccentrically but deliciously specialises in Greek food. The service is also very good.

But then we were having a shower this morning in our outside bathroom (there’s a wall around it, not literally outside but certainly open-air) when Maureen suddenly discovered a man perched on a wall behind our bungalow doing something with a pipe and staring at her. Since we were both dressed as nature intended, this was not appropriate. No, there’s no photos today.

I went to the reception utterly furious, and wasn’t really mollified by their garbled explanations – it’s not really explanations you want at this point. The manager was better, apologising and promising to look into it and speak to me later. Later he found me and apologised profusely, explaining that they were outside contractors so he couldn’t influence their conduct but that he totally accepted the failure of his staff to come and tell guests in those bungalows that work would happen today. I did accept his apology, and touchingly he said that he still didn’t think the apology was enough but he didn’t know what else to do.

Later on this evening when I finally buckled and went to reception to ask for an hour of stinking WiFi access so we could finally update our blog, he spotted a way of apologising and told me where there was a secret network cable that I could plug our laptop into for free access. He also explained that the hotel has to buy these WiFi access cards from the provider, so it looks like my ire should be directed at the greedy local internet company rather than the hotel!

Don’t worry, we were both more angry than mortified at the invasion of privacy.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011 at 11:55 am and is filed under Indonesia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.