| Address: Ahmedabad, Gujarat |
| Website: www.oyorooms.com |
Hello,
Recently I did my FIRST AND WORST room booking at Oyo Rooms.
The experience was so awful that I'll never want to book a hotel through Oyo Rooms again and would certainly ask all my friends, relatives and professional contacts never to fall into the TRAP of Oyo Rooms and book hotels through conventional methods or through some other RELIABLE websites. I’m writing about the following Worst Experience with Oyo Rooms with an intention that innocent people don’t fall into marketing traps of such websites and especially such Fake Hotels like Hotel Mountain Residency.
I request Oyo Rooms to kindly verify all the below facts by their records & from CCTV Footage at Hotel Mountain Residency as I’m planning to take LEGAL ACTION against Oyo Rooms & Hotel Mountain Residency through Police & Consumer Court as well as publicize on blogs, consumer support portals, hotel booking websites & all social media platforms so that other people don’t get fooled & cheated.
Last week, on 30th Jan 2016, I and my wife were travelling to Ahmedabad for some official work. Though we have friends & relatives in Ahmedabad, we decided not to disturb them and rent a room for ourselves near the venue of our work, which was Judges Bungalow Road. I asked my sister to check out some hotel in the vicinity. She came across few options there out of which Oyo Rooms looked interesting. Partly because of the location and partly because of the hype about it, we wanted to try Oyo Rooms. My sister booked a room for me and my wife and we got accommodation in following hotel:
OYO Rooms Bodakdev SG Highway: Hotel Mountain Residency
4th Floor, Santanu complex, Opp: Indian Oil, Near GNFC Tower & TGB, SG Highway, Ahmedabad.
Booking Number: QPCS3892, Check-in: Sun 30 Jan 2016.
On Saturday, 30th Jan 2016, we reached Ahmedabad at around 6:30 in the morning and starting 7 am we called up Oyo Rooms Helpline number +91 [protected] repeatedly to get an EARLY CHECK-IN at the hotel because Oyo Rooms has a VERY SMART POLICY OF 12-PM CHECK-IN & all communication to hotel only through OYO. We didn’t have any direct number of the Hotel to contact them directly. Every time the OYO customer care executive would take our request and try to connect us to Hotel Staff, but after a pause of almost 15 minutes, the phone used to get disconnected without any reply from Hotel Staff.
We saw that this was HIGHLY UNPROFESSIONAL but we thought maybe it was a communication failure. Hence after repeated attempts to confirm Early Check-In and AFTER THUS WASTING AN HOUR MORE AT THE BUS-STOP TRYING TO COMMUNICATE TO OYO, we decided to go to the Hotel. Around 8:30 or so we reached outside Hotel Mountain Residency which was quite difficult to locate.
We were surprised to see that there was an old building (Santanu Complex) where you enter into a basement parking like a residential apartment. 4th floor of this Once-A-Residential-Apartment was modified to give a visual appearance of some CHEAP HOTEL with straight rooms on both sides of a reception area in the middle. It looked more like a HOSTEL than a HOTEL. By this time, we were exhausted because of long journey and unnecessary delay in contacting the hotel. We found it much below our expectations as there are much better hotels available in Ahmedabad for less than half of the price shown there. Certainly they show great pictures and highly inflated prices and then fool the travelers by offering them great deals while booking through hotel-booking websites like OYO. We felt fooled, but we didn’t want to take the trouble of going to another Hotel then. Plus the reception person didn’t mention any Extra Charge for EARLY CHECK-IN. So we thought it was fine & around 8:45 or 9:00 am we Checked-in.
We paid for 1 day and were given Room No. 401 which was the first room facing the Reception. Room was fine but there was NO DRINKING WATER, NO SHAMPOO, NO SOAP, NO TOWEL, NO NAPKIN, NOTHING in the room. We were carrying our towels and personal kit which we used to get ready in the bathroom with leaking taps & wet floor. Main switch to start Water Geyser was at the Reception! And there was NO MINI FRIDGE too in the room as shown in the website. Immediately after getting ready, we asked the hotel room service for drinking water and breakfast which is supposed to be COMPLIMENTARY with the room. The waiter / attendant replied “Water, breakfast - everything is chargeable.”
Now we were not surprised anymore as we couldn’t expect hospitality in such a filthy place though it is covered in OYO Policy. We left for my wife’s seminar at Judges Bungalow Road. At noon time I returned to the hotel to rest while my wife, who is a doctor, attended her medical seminar for which we had come to Ahmedabad. I took the stairs this time only to find how dirty the whole building actually was. I reached 4th floor which was made to look like hotel, I asked reception people why were there no towels etc. in the room. So they sent 2 towels and 2 tiny OYO kits to my room.
Then a tall girl in jeans – top, covering her head & partly her face with a dupatta and carrying a college bag at her back & scooter keys in her hand came to hotel reception. She inquired twice or thrice “I want to take a look at the room before I check-in.” I was surprised to see why a college girl who looks like a local person has booked a room in such a place. I thought maybe she has booked it for some relatives, but normally we insist our relatives to stay at our home even if we have to adjust for it. That’s our culture. Nevertheless, I ignored.
In the evening, I asked the reception people about next day’s check-out. I told the reception guys that we have to catch bus after 7 pm. So I can check out at 11 AM as per check out time without paying extra money for no use and they can provide us a locker to keep our luggage as we don’t need the room anyways because my wife was busy with seminar and I had other work in the city. To this, the reception people at the fake Hotel Mountain Residency asked us not to worry. One of them said “You don’t need to check out and leave the room. You checked-in early and you’ll check out late. Do one thing- give us Rs. 500/- extra and that will sort out everything. We’ll manage.” Other two people sitting at reception agreed.
Next morning, Sunday 31st Jan 2016, we were again not given any complimentary water or breakfast. Everything we ordered was charged on our bill. At 9 am I went to drop my wife at seminar venue and returned at 10:30 AM to the hotel. I re-confirmed the hotel reception people about check-out. They said, “don’t worry you can check out late without additional pay. Just pay us Rs.500/- extra for overall extra stay.” So, at 11 AM I went out for my work in the city.
At around 4pm when I returned to the hotel, I saw a good looking young lady, certainly not a hotel staff, sitting comfortably on a Sofa just next to the reception desk & talking to 2 reception guys and 2 waiters. I felt little weird to see a single lady sitting there talking to 4 random people. Normally as I know, it is an uncomfortable situation for women as the reception lobby was a very small area. Nevertheless, I went to my room to pack things up for the evening departure.
In the evening too, I saw quite a few young couples (maybe college couples or office mates working in nearby IT Complexes) coming in the hotel without any luggage. The hotel location is certainly not a tourist spot for honeymooners, though it looks certainly a suitable offset place for young unmarried couples to spend some good private time after college or after work.
At around 7:30 PM I and my wife went to the reception to check out. The reception person this time DEMANDED 1 FULL DAY ADDITIONAL RENT FOR LATE CHECK-OUT. When I objected saying “you asked only Rs. 500/- additional for overall extra stay. We wanted to check out in the morning but you said pay only 500/- additional and stay as much you want.” He refused to budge. He knew that we had our bookings after 7pm and we were in a hurry, so he wickedly said “you can wait here and talk to the other guy when he comes after 2 hours. He’ll resolve your query. You’ll pay or else he’ll pay from his pocket. These OYO people don’t leave any penny. They charge full rent even if you check-out at 11:30am. Ideally you have to pay 3 DAYS RENT for EARLY CHECK-IN & LATE CHECK-OUT. You can ask OYO – these are the rules. OYO Rooms will take every penny from us. We’ll have to pay from our pockets.” The reception people knew that we were in a big hurry and they tried their best to exploit us. They humiliated us saying “YOU HAVE STAYED IN A HOTEL FOR THE FIRST TIME IT SEEMS. YOU DON’T KNOW ANY RULES. DON’T BOOK HOTELS AGAIN.” Ultimately we had to give in.
We ended up paying almost 2.5 TIMES THE AMOUNT which we were supposed to pay. When we asked for a receipt, they said “Wait for 15 mins. Other guy will come and print a receipt.” But we knew there was NOTHING PROFESSIONAL that we can expect there. Waiting uselessly for few minutes, we left but we missed our bus in all this turmoil and had to spend extra time & money to make another booking, wait at BUS STOP for another bus till 11:30 PM and spent the entire following night remembering the trouble we saw because we booked an OYO Room. We recalled our last beautiful stay in Ahmedabad, which was at Hotel Radisson Blu. Hotel Radisson Blu would have cost us only a little higher that what we actually paid for a filthy disgusting OYO Room.
After returning home, when I saw the details of the OYO Booking, I was shocked to see that my booking details show only single day charges paid at Hotel Mountain Residency whereas I paid almost 2.5 times that amount at the Hotel. Means the entire extra amount that I paid went into the pockets of the Manager at Hotel Mountain Residency and was unaccounted for.
It became clear to us now:
1) why nobody answered at hotel reception when OYO wanted to officially get Early Check-in for us
2) why Reception Desk didn’t have an Authorized person / Manager with proper dress and name badge,
3) why there were 4 or 5 persons taking rounds to chair the reception desk every hour or so
4) why they never gave us any contact card, phone number or other detail of the hotel and
5) why in spite o[censored]s demanding, they didn’t give us any receipt of amount taken from us.
All planned is strategy to cheat & exploit the customers, escape any liability and run unethical services for providing Rooms for young (unmarried) couples etc. in the name of Hotel. When they show less than half of the money paid by customers on their records, they can very well skip the names of many guests staying at the Hotel for “SHORT-TIME.” I won’t be surprised if the Police also bust a prostitution racket at Hotel Mountain Residency.
I REQUEST GENUINE PEOPLE TO STAY AWAY FROM HOTEL MOUNTAIN RESIDENCY AND AVOID BOOKING THROUGH OYO ROOMS because OYO doesn’t do detailed background analysis of whether a place is really a Hotel or a cheap place for unethical activities managed by unprofessional greedy crooks.
OYO Rooms customer support has been notified about the posted complaint.
Some properties are not even a dhaba standard in terms of service
It's sad to see such a big promise and no delivery
It's a wake-up call to them to get all properties audited on standards promised. I know more than 60 % will not qualify.