Suite, Suite Persistence

Ah, such a delicious little pun for what you’re about to read.

Business hotels in India are extremely comfortable, modern facilities where one can easily lose sight of what it means to actually be part of society.  That being said, after seven nights in a standard room filled to the brim with six large duffel bags worth of clothing, four carry-on bags worth of stuff, and two increasingly cranky Americans, something had to give.  In this case, that something was the temperature of the room.  Having made multiple calls to the front desk and having multiple visits from maintenance, it was time for resolution.   Maintenance routine seemed to be, (1) come to the room with a ladder, (2) remove a piece of the ceiling, (3) claim to make some change to the filtration system, (4) tell Americans to wait 30 to 60 minutes when all their troubles would disappear in the cool breeze of an air conditioned room.

On what we believe was the fifth call, the Duty Manager decided he would personally come to the room with maintenance to ensure his customers were happy.  After following the same four step maintenance routine, we finally said, “You’ve been here before, we’ve heard the same story, it’s not going to be fixed in 30 minutes and I think we both know that.”  Finally, the duty manager admitted that he would have to “turn the cold air on for the entire floor.”  Our response, “sweet, let’s do that.”  For some reason, this response was unexpected and he then said, “OK, I will turn on the cold air for the entire floor and everyone’s room will cool down to 21 degrees.”

As you might imagine, this response perplexed Lindsay and I both and we both went on the offensive with two very different arguments.   Lindsay chose the “emotional customer-focused” argument claiming that wouldn’t he just be upsetting all the other customers for the benefit of us.  I chose the logic-based argument of “then why do you even have thermostats in rooms if guests can’t select their own temperature”.  We were making sweet music, and it wasn’t even planned.  Though even we couldn’t have guessed what would happen next.  He responded, “Perhaps we can change your room, we could see if a suite would be more to your liking.”  Bingo.  It wasn’t even our goal as we had no intention of packing up six duffels worth of clothing and going through the effort of changing rooms.

Then we saw the suite.

I’ve never seen two people pack that much luggage so quickly.  Within 30 minutes we were unpacking in a spacious two-room suite where we can actually sit on something besides the bed without also sitting on what could also be referred to as out "dresser".

The temperature?  Absolutely frigid.  Lindsay slept in multiple layers the first night and is now officially banned from calling the front desk.