Just what exactly is an Executive Club room at ITC hotels?

This is not a hotel review (though come to think of it, I've never written a review of this hotel, which is said because it is a pretty neat place). It is a bit of a rant, if you can call it that.

I've always had a bit of a struggle understanding whether Executive Club (or EC) rooms at ITC hotels in India, are of a category higher or lower than regular rooms. When I say regular rooms, I mean those vanilla ones that do not come with complimentary benefits like one or more of: breakfast, lounge access, internet, use of business centre, and a specified number of pieces of laundry. Rooms at ITC hotels are often touted as “EC”, and the way the check-in agents say it (I suppose they've been adequately trained, too!) is to make it sound like there could be nothing better than an EC room. Also see this post on Tripadvisor, though this one's about the ITC Grand Maratha, Mumbai.

My recent stay last week in an EC room at the ITC Grand Central, Mumbai, did nothing to clarify my confusions or dispel my doubts. 

I’ve stayed at this hotel before, and I’ve usually had fairly large rooms leading straight off the corridor, double beds and a reasonably spacious bathroom (with shower cubicle and bath tub separate). As has also been the case with EC rooms in other hotels, such as the ITC Sonar, Kolkata.

On the contrary, the room I had on my last week’s visit was at one extreme corner of the passageway that led off from the main corridors, a touch smaller than the rooms I’ve normally had. I'm not sure the picture below does justice to that comment, but take a look.

It also had a single bed (king sized), and what I’d call a “cramped” bathroom with the shower head placed in the bath tub area itself.

Now, at least as the shower bit goes, this is fairly standard across most hotels, so I’m not complaining. It’s just that I don’t know what to expect with an EC room. At least, it had two things going for it.

One, there was no tag on the bathrobe to wag a moral finger at you (and as an aside, I think one of these days I’ll write about the various bathrobe tags I’ve seen!).

And secondly, there’s a nice little couch in an alcove, which I realised existed only in morning when I went to draw the curtains and let the sunlight in. I can only look at this as a great place for a whisky and a good book.

For the record, here's what the ITC Hotels website has to say about the EC rooms at the ITC Grand Central, Mumbai. I suppose a wide angle camera can do wonders for the room!

But the bottom line is, I'm still confused about the Executive Club room.