Mixed feelings – Going green at The Westin Velachery, Chennai

 To me personally, every stay in a hotel is usually at one end of the spectrum or the other – pretty good or pretty bad. And even the ones that start off on the wrong foot, more often than not, end up being a good stay because the hotel considers it important and does what it takes to ensure that the overall experience is positive (and no! I don’t mention that I’m a travel blogger, or do the DYKWIA act!). You can read about some of my recent hotel stays here.

So it is not often that I’ve come back from a hotel stay, unsure of my opinion.

My recent stay at The Westin Velachery in MAA is something I can’t really straitjacket into a simple opinion. I stayed there for just one night, to attend a wedding in MAA. The two-day event was quite hectic, and I was tired through all of it after having woken up at 4 am on a Saturday morning. I’m beginning to think that might have been the reason for my petulance. Anyways…

The hotel itself is rather new – a property that was recently opened. From the outside, its just a large building of brick and glass, with rectangular patterns everywhere you look.

Fountain opposite the entrance

Structure and form...only to lead to disappointment inside!

 

The inside, on the contrary, is quite the opposite – lots of curves and general formlessness. Now I’m the kind that likes consistency, and so this stark contrast probably put me off. I know that’s rather baseless, but well, it takes all sorts, right? (Should I add that, although the security procedures at the main gate were fine, at the entrance to the hotel, I'd be very charitable by calling it "extremely variable"?)

The couch seems like time and space curved!

 

Elevator lobby

I mean, take one look at the lighting. It *IS* confusing !

Check in

I checked in just past 2 pm, and the check in was a major major hassle.

Check in area

I had initially booked for a single occupancy, but the Mrs decided to come along, so it turned out to be twin occupancy. Now in the past, I’ve never, EVER, had a problem with that – either the hotel waives the extra and charges only for single occupancy, or very directly makes the point and charges for twin (which I am happy to pay, if I hadn’t booked it as twin occupancy initially). Mind you, being an SPG Gold member didn’t help either. These guys made such a fuss of the whole exercise, that I was quite prepared to cancel my booking and move to the nearby Park Hyatt (which had a goodweekend promo running, and still does). Plus this is the first time that I’ve had ANY hotel in India take copies of the photographic identification document of BOTH people in the room. Strange!

The room

I don’t know why, but I was expecting a much better room. Maybe I had been pampered by the ITC Windsor over the previous weekend? Who knows. So, the room is of the standard sort – vestibule, bathroom, living area (twin bed, flat TV, work desk and a couch). Here are some pictures. 

 

There’s a sliding glass door in three parts that separates the bedroom from the bathroom. The glass is frosted but doesn’t do a good job of keeping the light out of the bathroom, as you can see from the picture above. So if you’re two in the room and one is an early riser, the other can’t sleep much – take my word for it, it did happen! More reason for my irritation, I suppose!

Bathroom

Probably the one thing about the room as such that I found interesting. Nice, reasonably large-ish shower cubicle, comfortable bath tub, and excellent bath supplies.

Wardrobe

Another quirky thing about the room is the bathroom/wardrobe door. It is more of a sliding panel than a door, and can only be used to close one of them – either the bathroom or the wardrobe. And I don’t like to keep the clothes closet open in a hotel room. It upsets me. Now, why on earth would anybody design something as useless as that?

There’s also a safe in the wardrobe area, and below it is a…well, I don’t know what it is. It seems like one of those ancient laundry bins that was there at our ancestral home in South India.

What’s with all the green?

I now come to the strangest part of things. There’s an overdose of green in the room. Now, I don’t mean that it is an eco-friendly hotel or anything of that sort. Just that there’s a LOT of things in the room that are green, and frankly, it’s a shade of green that’s not very appealing or soothing, particularly when there’s an excess of it. The couch, some of the bed linen, the glass separator between the bedroom and bathroom, the bath supplies, the Westin monogrammed post-it notes, and worst of all, the pen at the writing desk. JUST.TOO.MUCH.GREEN. (yes, *this* green).

Check out

Again, check out wasn’t all that smooth. I’d booked three rooms in my name with my SPG number, which is something that SPG has allowed for some time now. While they had confirmed the SPG details on check-in, somehow they didn’t seem to have it for two of the rooms, at check-out time. Worse still, it was only at check-out that I realized that I was staying in a room where I wasn’t even on the guest list – it was in the name of another person in the family that I had booked it for. I left, almost in a huff.

Impressions

I agree this may not be the best report, but as I said, it wasn’t the best experience either. There’s even an undercurrent of annoyance with the property as I’m writing this. But to be fair, and as I mentioned earlier, I was probably very tired, and that may have been the reason for my not-so-great experience. I won’t mind going back there, if only to check if this kind of discomfiting experience is a consistency.

[Update - March 2014]

• What's good: new hotel, clean rooms
• What could be better: staff awareness of elite benefits, overall service attitude, less green (!)