Author: SK

Dressing up in residential schools

As  I was getting ready this morning to go deliver my lecture at IIMB, the wife expressed surprise at how casually I was dressed (I wore jeans, a (collared, “formal”) t-shirt and a hoodie). “In my business school all professors wear suits”, she said. My mind went back to the time when I was a student at IIMB, trying to remember what professors wore. While they were generally dressed more formally than I was today, no one wore suits – the only one who wore a blazer every day was easily the worst professor who taught me at IIMB!

I was thinking about why I don’t feel like dressing formally while going to IIM. And then I thought of the students, and realised that with the odd exception, I’m easily much more formally dressed than most of my students. When students turn up to class in track pants, professors have no incentive to wear anything close to a suit!

And this is not a new phenomenon. Back in my time too, close to ten years ago, people would wear track pants and other articles of clothing you might describe as “home wear” to class (Not me, though. I don’t wear track pants. As a rule. But I remember making it a point to wear shorts to all my final term examinations). So I started thinking about what it is about IIMB that makes people wear “home wear” to class. And I realised it has to do with the proximity.

IIM Bangalore is a wholly residential campus, and the student accommodation is a short walk away from most of the classrooms. In the second year, thanks to electives time tables are such that there is a good chance of having long breaks between classes, so you go to the academic part of the institute for only one class.

When you are going to a classroom that is only a short walk away from where you live, and when you go there only for one or two classes, it doesn’t feel like you’re “going somewhere”, so you don’t see any point in dressing up. Moreover, most of the people you meet in class are people you share a hostel with – these people would have seen you in your pyjamas anyway, and seen you get sloshed all over L^2 during one of those parties which I’m told are not so common nowadays! So there is no good reason for you to dress up! And you come to the class in pyjamas!

The wife’s B-school is not residential, and people live a few kilometres away. Very few pairs of people would have seen each other in their pyjamas, and the distance means people are “going somewhere” when going to a school. And so people dress up (and by that I mean they really dress up!). And when students are well-dressed, the professor wants to show off his superior social standing, and thus wears as formal clothes as he can – which usually means a suit!

Again I’m talking from small number of data points – I’ve lived in another residential institution (IIT Madras) – and that too was famous for its rather muted/horrible dressing sense. It’s a pity/mercy (depending on the way you look at it) that us IIMB people manage to well cover up our generally bad dressing by wearing suits at interviews and PPTs and other public events!

NED Video

So after looking at the videos of the first NED Talks which I had rather badly shot, I put NED for putting them together and uploading. That’s where the wife came to the rescue, as always. She scraped and collected bits and pieces of people’s talks which weren’t all that bad, and has put together this montage.

So presenting, the videos of the first ever NED Talks, held at our residence on Friday.

Next time we will get volunteers so that the videos are recorded better and we hope to upload complete individual talks!

NED Talks – First Edition

Back in 2009, the TED conference was held in Mysore. If there can exist TED Talks, I reasoned, there is no reason why we cannot have NED talks. And as is my wont, I had shot off a blog post in April 2009, announcing that the first NED Talks would happen in October 2009. Some of the points I had made in that blog post are interesting – I had said that it would be a day long (or even weekend long event), speakers would be “mango people”, and that talks would be uploaded on Youtube. I had no clue what would happen at the NED Talks.

Much happened though between April 2009, when I wrote that blog post, and October 2009, when the first edition of the talks were to happened. I moved jobs. I moved cities. My mother died. Life changed way too much for me to be bothered about NED Talks any more. And so I did what came naturally to me – put NED!

On several occasions in the last five years I’ve thought of “finally organising” the NED Talks, but they never came to fruition for a multitude of reasons, the most important of them being NED itself! I would think I would organise it, start thinking about how I would organise it, and then get confused, and then get into doubt, and thus, postpone! I went through several cycles of this until last month.

It was a day before the wife was to return to Bangalore for her winter holidays, and she suggested that we do the talks while she is in town. She was in luck that I was prepared to listen to her that day. And the idea took root. A guest list was quickly prepared. One guest was quickly signed up and with his help we froze what seemed like a convenient date. And by the end of the day, the first set of invites had been sent out!

The inaugural edition of the NED Talks took place last night, at our residence in Bangalore. There were a total of thirteen speakers, each of whom spoke for five minutes each. Both from our pertinent observations, and from the feedback we received from attendees, I think the event was a grand success. Like they say in Page 3 party reports, “everybody had a good time”.

The format was designed so as to be conducive to NED. One of the big barriers to hosting an event is to arrange for a venue. So we decided to do it in our own home. We didn’t want audience to put NED during the talks, so each speaker was allotted five minutes (though by my accounts most exceeded that limit). Getting professional video was NED-inducing, so we set up a DSLR on a tripod. Food came from the nearby Upahara Darshini and Gayathri Stores. Wine from Venus Wine Stores, also very nearby. The whole thing was set up such that there was no way for us to put NED.

And no one put NED. The talks were all excellent, and thought-provoking. Though none of them were “ideas that can change the world” as TED promises, they were all interesting. So we had a demonstration on different kind of knives, and an exposition on the enduring appeal of late 80s-early 90s Bollywood music – whose musical qualities leave much to be desired. Someone spoke about the importance of being shallow, and someone else on what makes someone interesting. There was a demonstration on the engineering behind consumption of certain herbal products! Thirteen speeches. All very well received.

This being the first edition there were the usual glitches. I had taken upon myself the quadruple role of emcee, DJ, photographer and videographer, which meant that the latter three didn’t receive much attention. So soft background music which was supposed to be played during talks were never played. Some talks were not captured on video at all, while others were only partially recorded (so we will only be putting up a montage of the talks on youtube rather than individual videos). The same camera was being used for taking both photos and videos, which meant not many photos were taken!

Post the event one NED-inducing activity is to make a montage of the videos. We’ve put enthu and done the first part which is cutting up interesting sections from different videos. Now we have the job of stitching them together. Hopefully we’ll upload pretty soon!

Nevertheless the wife and I are extremely kicked that we managed to pull this off. That the much-awaited NED talks finally happened. And now that they’ve happened, we hope to have them on a regular basis. Given that they’ll continue to happen in our drawing room, they’ll remain invite-only events, though.

Jai to NED!

Queueing dynamics at Ranga Shankara

Last night we went to Ranga Shankara in JP Nagar to watch a play.  Thanks to unusually heavy traffic on 11th Main Road Jayanagar, we reached there only at 7 pm (the play was due to start at 7:30), and there was already a long line at the foot of the stairs waiting to be let in.

For the uninitiated, Ranga Shankara follows “free seating” also known as “Air Deccan seating”. There are no seat numbers – in fact the seats are themselves not clearly demarcated – there are long tiered rows of cushioned benches on which you sit. So the seats are essentially filled on a first come first served basis. This enables Ranga Shankara to to fill up the benches in good time once people are let in, and the show can begin on time. Also, unlike Air Deccan, Ranga Shankara sees high social capital so people don’t jostle and fight for seats.

As we walked in and picked up our tickets (after showing our e-tickets), the wife said that there was no point joining the queue as we would be so far behind that there was no chance of us getting good seats. So we might as well eat before the play started, she reasoned. So off we went to the adjoining Ranga Shankara Cafe and thulped Sabudana Vada and coffee. The pricing was premium but the food and coffee were very good.

As we were gulping down our coffee, preparing to possibly join the queue, the wife spotted the renowned actor Mukhyamantri Chandru near the entrance of the theatre. We presently saw him posing for selfies with some people, and we have to do the same, we reasoned.

Chandru turned out to be an incredibly warm and nice person and enthusiastically talked to us for ten minutes. We told him that we’re major fans of his Ramanamurthy role in Ganeshana Madhuve. He asked us to come for the performance of Mukhyamantri (which gave him his name) today, but we told him that we’ve already seen the play.

mchandru

We got talking about theatre and cinema and how acting is different in the two. Chandru told us that in a play an actor has to constantly play a dual role – one role is the role that he is playing in the play, and the second is that of a manager. It is inevitable that some slips happen during the course of the play, he mentioned, and what makes acting in a theatre tough is that you need to course correct on the fly without giving away to the audience that you’ve slipped up.

By the time we were done talking to Chandru, the line had cleared and the bell rang indicating that there were 10 minutes to go for the play. “You better hurry”, he told us, “else you’ll have to sit in the last row”. We didn’t bother particularly hurrying and it was the last row where we sat (there were seats available at the peripheries of forward rows but we wanted to watch the play from a central position to chose to sit in the last row instead).

Now I might have watched about 10 plays in Ranga Shankara, and sat in different positions to watch each one of them. There have been plays where I’ve sat right in the middle of one of the forward rows (the best seats in the house), and ones like yesterday where I’ve either sat right at the back or at one of the peripheries of the baseball-diamond shaped theatre. And what I realised is that the experience from each of these positions is near-identical!

In other words, the design of Ranga Shankara is so good that you are likely to have a great experience irrespective of where in the hall you sit! Or that the experience from the last row is not much inferior to that from one of the best seats in the house!

Yet, every play I’ve gone to I’ve seen a long line build up at the foot of the stairs before the play begins. It is as if people don’t believe that experience in the inferior seats is not very inferior to that of the experience in the best seats in the house, and are thus willing to pay a high price (time spent waiting in queue) to get the marginally better seats!

I don’t know if I’ve miscalculated on the relative merits of different seats in the house, or if the “market” (the rest of the people who stand in line) has got the pricing wrong! I’ll probably experiment a few more times at Ranga Shankara by not bothering to stand in line!

Factorising 2015

Sometimes when I come across a new number I factorise it, just for kicks. So when the year ticked over that’s what I tried doing.

It is intuitive that 2015 is divisible by 5, so I quickly decomposed it into 5 times 403. And then my intuitive reaction was “403 looks prime. So 2015 is such an uninteresting number”.

But then doing the rigorous analysis (dividing 403 by all primes <= 20 (= sqrt (403)), I figured that it goes by 13, and can be decomposed into 13 and 31, which makes it quite interesting!

So 2015 is a product of 5, 13 and 31, which makes it interesting, in that it is a product of relatively small primes!

The year began well here in Bangalore. It started drizzling soon after the clocks ticked over 12, and this morning has also been what people might describe as “gloomy” but what I find to be absolutely romantic weather!

Wish you all a happy and prosperous 2015!

Modifying old blog posts

The wife and I have both spent the last day of 2014 consolidating our blogs. I’ve imported my posts from the two other blogs that I’ve been writing for the last couple of years – bespokedata.in and rq.nationalinterest.in. The plan is that rather than having a dispersed voice across blogs, I’ll integrate everything here. As part of that exercise I’ve made some personal blog posts password-protected, and made some others private.

Of course there are some “arbit” posts that are still visible, and when I do end up putting my name on this blog they’ll come to be associated with me. But then I consider them to be part of my character – if you strip away the arbitness from my body of writing then it might as well have been not written by me. Impersonal writing is just not for me.

Anyway so while I’ve been consolidating my blogs and taking some posts private, the wife has been doing something similar. Today she started what she says is her eighth blog – she calls herself a “compulsive blog starter”. As part of the consolidation process, she has imported her posts from her seven previous blogs into this one.

Now, some of these seven blogs are old, really old, and contain posts that she is not currently particularly proud of. And she has spent a considerable amount of time today editing and deleting some of these posts – most of which had been written as far back as in 2006. She says that some of the stuff she had written back then is not consistent with the person that she is today, and hence it is worth deleting. I’m not so sure.

I think a blog is like an online diary. Among other things it’s a record of your thoughts at a particular point in time. Going back a few years to someone’s blogs helps us understand what that person was like at that point in time, and perhaps do a comparative analysis of what they were then to what they are now.

While the wife has been modifying and deleting some ancient blog posts, I’ve also been dealing with some old blog posts, but in a different way. I’ve been reading them. And reading my posts from 2004 and 2005 have helped me understood my thought process in those years, and what my life was like then. These posts help me understand some of the decisions that I had made then which I have subsequently questioned.

Of course there is more than a fair share of cringeworthy posts from that period, but my logic is that while they may not be consistent with the person that I am today, they need not be. By updating those posts to make them consistent with the person that I am today, I’m making them inconsistent with the date tagged to the posts!

Nothing is permanent, and that includes a person’s frame of mind and way of thinking. It is almost a given that one is likely to find one’s old writing (irrespective of how old it is) cringeworthy on some front or the other. That however doesn’t mean that a person goes back in time changing one’s thoughts to make them more contemporary! For doing so destroys information that is embedded in the post as it is!

So I must mention that I’m not particularly in approval of the wife’s updation and deletion of her old blog posts. While I’ve done something like that (taking some posts private) I haven’t destroyed any information nor changed them in an irretrievable fashion. Modifying old blog posts is like rewriting history!

Ashirwad Retail

This is a blog post I had written on 12th June 2007 and for some reason not published! Was cleaning up my drafts today and found this, and thought it would be good to publish just to show how I thought 7 years back! 

This evening I accompanied my mother to this store called Ashirwad Departmental Stores in Basavanagudi (near South End Circle). If you would ask me to describe the store I might probably call it a family-owned supermarket. And in my opinion, that store is easily the best department store I’ve seen in terms of customer service. And I believe this particular model might end up being the big success story in Indian retail.

Being a stand-alone store, Ashirwad may not have the supply chain efficiencies that chains such as Big Bazaar claim to have. It may not offer the discounts that say a Subhiksha offers. It may not be airconditioned and have the perfect lighting like yet another of the larger retailers. However, I believe it makes up for all this, and more

What Ashirwad so nicely achieves is in combining the good points of both organized and unorganized retail while trying to eliminate the drawbacks of both. To elaborate, one usually associates family run ‘kirana’ stores with inconvenient formats (you need to ask the shopkeeper for everything you need), lack of facility for bill payment for credit cards (i hear this is changing now), old or non-moving stock, the lack of a “shopping experience” and so forth.

Organized retail usually loses out on factors such as incompetent staff and store managers, ignorance of staff about store layout, bureaucracy, rules and most importantly the “impersonal” feeling. There are also quality issues that people (such as my mother) raise about the store-branded goods (mostly groceries) that are available at the supermarkets.

A family run supermarket tackles them all. The thing with Ashirwad is that the guy at the billing counter (there is just one, and there are no huge queues) is one of the owners of the store, and the store P&L has a direct impact on his life. He reports to no one, and hence has to offer no explanations. This solves a large number of problems – starting from billing time to allowing people to selling without a bill. Also, I noticed one thing that two people do the billing simultaneously (one looks at the items and packs them, while the other keys in the codes) speeds up the billing process by a huge amount.

Then, there is the format itself. It is a supermarket “help yourself” format, but there are staff all around (and they really know the store) in order to help you out if you can’t locate something. The level of intrusion, in my opinion, is just right. In fact, there are enough staff in the store so if you can’t, or don’t want to, go around the store to fetch things for yourself, the staff will do it for you, converting the store into a regular kirana. And you can browse all day if you want, and the staff won’t bother you, and it becomes a supermarket!

The most important thing that sets Ashirwad apart from the other supermarkets is that “personal” feeling. It being a family-run store, the staff are also fairly permanent (this perhaps explains their knowledge of the store layout – something sorely lacking in current “organized retail”) and if you visit the store a couple of times you become a “regular customer” and get the associated benefits. The same staff being there always also helps in case you want to return defective goods (another major hassle at supermarkets) or go to claim some unclaimed discount. Oh, and by the way, Ashirwad delivers.

The most important thing that sets Ashirwad apart from the other family run stores is it’s size and format. The shopping experience is sorely missing in the kiranas, and the fact that you need a shopkeeper to serve you also increases service time. They accept both credit card and meal pass coupons without a fuss, and most of the stock looks fresh. The in-store brands (in groceries) are also supposed to be of good quality.

However, what really struck me about Ashirwad, and I see that as a clear sign of financial strength, is the range of inventory. One way stores like Subhiksha save on expenses is by stocking only the really fast moving of FMCGs, thus saving on inventory carrying costs. Which means that every visit to a Subhiksha has to be followed by a visit to some other store to get what you didn’t get at Subhiksha (which is a lot). The range of goods (talkign about biscuits and tea and cosmetics here) I saw at Subhiksha seemed much larger than that I’ve seen at Food World, or maybe even Big Bazaar. I’m really impressed.

Now that I’ve praised the Ashirwad model so much, the question is regarding its scalability. Is it possible for me to open a thousand Ashirwads, and hope to give the Big Bazaars and Reliance Retails a run for their money? The answer, I think, is no and yes.

One of the key things that make Ashirwad what it is is that it is a standalone store, and it is a family that runs it. As I talked earlier, a large number of benefits of kirana stores are also seen in Ashirwad purely because the guy at the cash counter owns a share of the P & L, and that he has full control of the store. I opening a thousand such stores would imply employing store managers, and staff, and doing everything top down. Doesn’t fit into the concept at all.

So is there some hope in this? What if I can link up with a thousand such kiranas and make money out of that? I need not open a thousand Ashirwads myself. What I need to do is to convert a thousand existing kiranas into Ashirwads. And get a share of their profits (or maybe a fixed fee) while they function like a thousand independent Ashirwads – with all the associated benefits, and owning their own P&Ls.

Now if this format is such a clear winner, why is it not being replicated? Why are there not already a thousand Ashirwads out there? Looking at the various players, the people best placed to convert to this format are the kirana owners. Why are they not doing it, when it is such a winner? I believe the main, and maybe only, reason is that they don’t NEED TO. They don’t see any benefits in remodeling their store, and offering things they are not offering right now, and are hence not spending in this direction. They believe they are making enough money in the present format and there is no need ot change.

In the introduction to this piece, I actually mentioned a couple of drawbacks that Ashirwad suffers vis-a-vis organized retail. I mentioned reduction in supply chain costs. And I also mentioned discounts. Is there a way in which we could work with say fifty Ashirwad-like stores in a large city such as Bangalore and help them save costs? Is there something we can do that can save costs for all these guys (and significnatly so that a part of it can be passed on to the customer) and also make a profit for ourselves?

What kind of model can we use for this? How can we save the costs for the stores? What revenue sharing model do we use, and how do we make money? Who invests in teh store remodeling, us or them? Why will the stores partner us? Will their revenues increase so much by joining with us that they can pay us a part of that? All these questions still need to be answered. And once I do that, I need to approach someone with loads of money in order ot implement it.

2014: Year in review

2014 was a big year in terms of changes in personal life, with two big events that might both end up being investments in potential bubbles.

In April this year, we completed the purchase of an apartment in Jayanagar, Bangalore. We had expressed our interest to buy it back in 2012, when the construction of the building started, but it took until 2014 for the building to get completed.

The first few months of the years thus went primarily into overseeing the final stages of construction of the house, getting the interiors done, and getting a bank loan to fund the purchase (which turned out to be harder than I expected). Finally, after what seemed like an eternity we moved into the apartment towards the end of May.

And barely two months later the wife moved out. In August she left for Barcelona to do an MBA at IESE Business School. She has completed one term and so far seems to be enjoying it. I’m back to a bachelorly life here in Jayanagar and so far I’ve been coping reasonably well.

I stopped making coffee at home in order to cut down my caffeine consumption. Now I walk 10 minutes to Maiya’s in Jayanagar 4th Block to get my caffeine fix. It costs eighteen rupees plus about five minutes spent standing in queue, but it’s really awesome and well worth it!

On the professional front, things have been quieter than I had imagined. My consulting continues, and I ventured into a new sector this year. I still need to up my business development, though, and that is going to be the focus in the new year. There have also been a couple of interesting opportunities for a change in line that have come up towards the end of the year but it now looks like I’ll continue what I’ve been doing.

There has been one exciting development on the professional front though – I started teaching at IIMB earlier this month. I’m an “adjunct faculty” and will be there for the length of one term. The classes started a bit slowly (in terms of student participation) but now I think I quite like the lot. And so far I’ve been enjoying teaching. I hope I can continue doing this going forward.

Another feature of my life this year is my constant in-and-out in my use of social media, primarily facebook and twitter. I was off twitter for all of January, August, September and October, and part of December. I was off Facebook for most of this time (all except January). The break helped and my blogging has picked up significantly. So much so that the hosting provider had to twice increase my bandwidth quota!

My plan for next year on the professional front is to ramp up on business development and hopefully expand my business. I want to write a book. I’d set a rather aggressive target for that but now it looks unlikely and I need to possibly extend it. And then I plan to see a little more of Europe (based in Barcelona – helps that Vueling has its hub there), and hopefully do a bike trip. Of course one can’t plan for everything!

Wishing all of you a happy new year 2015 and a great year ahead!

Natural monopoly in package delivery

I’ve never got a call from a postman asking for the route to my home. I’m assuming none of you have, either. In fact, it is extremely unlikely that anyone even writes the recipient’s phone numbers on any letter or package that is being sent by ordinary post. It is assumed that the address uniquely identifies your house and the postman knows how to get there.

However, every time I get a courier or any other package delivered I’m faced with a constant barrage of calls from the delivery person. And this after living in Jayanagar, which apart from a few dead ends and diagonal roads is like Manhattan in that mains and crosses can be easily used to identify approximate locations of addresses beyond which door numbers uniquely identify houses. The problem is that most delivery persons of “private” courier companies have as their domains areas much larger than Jayanagar, because of which they have little domain knowledge of Jayanagar.

The reason why delivery persons of “private” courier companies have large domain areas is the number of packages that these companies deliver – the market is generally quite fragmented and so the number of packages that a single company has to deliver in a particular area is low, because of which the area assigned to each delivery person is large, because of which the delivery person is unable to “figure out” his complete area, which makes the entire delivery process inefficient.

Package delivery can hence be considered to be a “natural monopoly“, in that it is more efficient for one provider to deliver packages in a particular area than for several providers to deliver in the same area. A single provider delivering packages in an area can have delivery persons who are knowledgeable about the area and can hence deliver with low transaction cost.

Hence there is scope for setting up a company that specialises in last mile delivery of packages, with delivery persons with intimate knowledge of small areas delivering packages in that area. This company can then take over the responsibility for delivery in that area from a large number of courier companies, e-commece companies which have their own logistics, etc. But then that will completely defeat the purpose of a “courier service”!

If only India Post increases reliability to a level where e-commerce players start using it rather than their own delivery services.

(Companies such as Uber, which sends you a different cab each time you call for one and thus has no way to exploit this “natural monopoly”, solve the problem by providing their drivers with GPS and turn by turn navigation. Perhaps courier companies can learn from this?)

The trigger for this post was this Amazon delivery person who kept calling me every two minutes asking me to provide him directions to my house. As if I don’t have any better job. I told him that figuring out addresses is a part of his job and he can’t outsource it to me. I’m not at home so I don’t know if he’s even delivered the package. 

Segmenting leisure hotels

The original idea for this pertinent observation comes from the wife. However, since she’s on an extended vacation and hence unlikely to blog this soon, I’m blogging it.

Hotels are traditionally classified into “business” and “leisure” hotels. As the names suggest, the former mostly cater to business travellers and the latter to vacationers. The lines can be a little blur, though, since business and leisure travels have complementary seasonality, thanks to which hotels practice “revenue management” by using their capacity for both business and leisure.

However, as we discovered during our vacation last week, leisure hotels can be further segmented into “couple hotels” and “family hotels”. Let me explain using the example of Vythiri Village Spa Resort where we spent most of last week. Based on our reading of the hotel, it was initially built to be a “couple hotel” but perhaps based on the kind of clientele they were getting, they turned it into a “family hotel”.

Now, the difference between couple hotels and family hotels essentially has to do with how child-friendly the place is. Vythiri, for example, had a “kids play area”, the balconies had been shuttered up with windows (creating greenhouses inside the balconies which made them horrible to hang out it, but making them safer for kids),  had a pantry area (the balcony had been converted into a pantry – so people wiht babies could bring their electric cookers and cook!) and activities such as “guided nature walks” and “artificial waterfalls”. Even at its deepest the swimming pool was not more than three feet deep (no I didn’t test it).

The reason I say that the hotel was built for couples is to do with the large bathroom which also included the walk-in closet. Given that you might want to multiplex between one person showering and another dressing at the same time, this design made it obvious that it only works for couples, but not for people with kids – most parents are shy about letting their kids see them in various stages of undress.

Then this resort advertised itself as a “spa resort”, and a massage was included in our package. This is again a “couple thing” for people with kids are unlikely to be able to take time off from their kids to visit the spa! So everything about this resort told you that it had been designed for couples, but then changed its positioning to become a “family resort”!

I guess you get the drift. And so whenever the manager would accost us and ask if things were good, the wife would quickly nod him a “yes”, and then privately tell me that we were the wrong target segment for the hotel, and so our feedback didn’t really matter to him!

And so we stayed there, for three nights and a bit, looking at screaming kids every time we hit the restaurant (the buffet spreads were nice, so we didn’t order room service); looking in bemusement at people “going on nature walks”, ignoring the “entertainment” at the “gala Christmas dinner” and so forth.

We had a good time, though, eating, sleeping, talking, hanging about – mostly within the confines of the room. The service was great, the staff extremely friendly and pleasant. Only that we were the wrong target segment for the hotel, and we didn’t realise that while booking!

PS: I tried looking for a “marketing” category to put this post under but realised that none such exists. Goes to show what I’ve not been blogging about!