Three of us spent one night at an executive suite in the Welcomhotel Coimbatore. 1. Let’s begin with the biggest complaint first. Halfway through a morning shower, the hot water simply stopped flowing both from the tap at the washbasin and from the showers too. Took about 15 minutes to resolve so I finished my bath with cold water which isn’t a big deal in a Kovai summer. But this is not something you want to happen at this price point, or, indeed, at a price point half as high as this. More so when you’re occupying an executive suite. Extremely disappointing. 2. There was some confusion at checkout. Our reservation included all 3 meals. And we had signed for one of those meals, and the restaurant had posted it as a bill payable. Reception took a few minutes to sort that out. 3. The lobby almost doesn’t exist. Once you pass through the doors, you are in what can at best be described as a passage facing the reception. This is well-lit, and I do like the aesthetics, but it’s just surprisingly small. Not complaining about this though; I was just amused. 4. We had an a la carte lunch and a buffet dinner. The quality of the food is, overall, good, as you would expect of the ITC group. The food at their Fortune hotels is often very good too. The buffet seemed to play to the crowd a little – there was a little too much tempering, it was a little too strong in its approach. But still, that is nitpicking. A la carte was pretty good. The staff are patient at taking orders and orders are taken seriously. But their knowledge of the menu isn’t sufficient. They have a dish called “ritu ki sabzi” or something of that sort which translates into “seasonal vegetables.” When we asked what the vegetables were this season, the best the waitress could do was to say “carrot” twice. The dish too was something like that: Nothing particularly seasonal about the vegetables. 5. We had an early breakfast. The buffet wasn’t quite ready yet. Nevertheless, the spread on the buffet is satisfactory but not as wide as you would expect. The quality of the food is excellent. The service was mediocre: I ordered a masala dosa which didn’t show up for 10 minutes. On inquiring about it again, the waitress (a different person) thought I was placing a fresh order and informed me that it would take about 10 minutes, a point which was never brought to my notice when I first ordered it. So I ordered a plain dosa instead. 6. Overall, the aesthetics of the hotel are nice. The restaurant, however, is dimmer than I’d like. At dinnertime, there was live music in the restaurant. I suspect that the hotel didn’t think its guests had personalities, because the loud volume made conversation extremely inconvenient. The rhythm was good (because it was essentially a metronome type of thing), the singer might have had some relationship with melody at some point in some life, but his accent made it (un)clear to us that nobody knew what the words of the songs were. 7. The room is well appointed. Once
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