We spent the last three days at a resort, here in Karnataka. The first day went off very peacefully. On the second day, a rather loud group checked in. However, our meal times generally didn’t intersect with theirs and they weren’t too much of a bother.
Yesterday, a bigger and louder (and rather obnoxious – they were generally extremely rude to the resort staff) group checked in. Unfortunately their meal times overlapped with ours, and their unpleasantness had a bearing on us. Our holiday would have been far better had this group not checked in to our resort, but there was no way we could have anticipated, or controlled for that.
The moral of the story, basically, is that your experience at a resort is highly dependent on who else is checked in to the resort at the same time.
The thing with resorts is that unlike “regular hotels”, you end up spending all your time during your holiday in the resort itself, so the likelihood of bumping into or otherwise encountering others who are staying at the resort is far higher. And this means that if you don’t want to interact with some of the people there, you sometimes don’t really have a choice.
Of course, it helped that the resort we were in had private swimming pools attached to each room, and was rather large. So the only times we encountered the other groups at the resort was at meal times. However, as we found during our last day there, that itself was enough to make the experience somewhat unpleasant.
My wife and I had a long conversation last night on what we could do to mitigate this risk. We wondered if the resorts we have been going to are “not premium enough” (then again, a resort with private swimming pools in each room can be considered to be as premium as it gets). However, we quickly realised that ability to pay for a holiday is not at all correlated with pleasantness.
We wondered if resorts that are out of the way or in otherwise not so popular places are a better hedge against this. Now, with smaller or less popular resorts, the risk of having unpleasant co-guests is smaller (since the number of co-guests is lower). However, if one or more of the co-guests happens to be unpleasant, it will impact you a lot more. And that’s a bit of a risk.
Maybe the problem is with India, we thought, since one of the nice resort holidays we’ve had in the last couple of years was in Maldives. Then again, we quickly remembered the time at Taj Bentota (on our honeymoon) where the swimming pool had been taken over by a rather loud tour group, driving us nuts (and driving us away to the beach).
We thought of weekday vs weekend. Peak season vs off season. School holidays vs exam season. We were unable to draw any meaningful correlations.
There is no solution, it seemed. Then we spent time analysing why we didn’t get bugged by fellow-guests at Maldives (my wife helpfully remembered that the family at the table next to ours at one of the dinners was rather loud and obnoxious). It had to do with size. It was a massive resort. Because the resort was so massive, there would be other guests who were obnoxious. However, in the size of the resort, they would “become white noise”.
So, for now, we’ve taken a policy decision that for our further travel in India, we’ll either go to really large resorts, or we’ll do a “tourist tour” (seeing places, basically) while staying at “business hotels”. This also means that we’re unlikely to do another multi-day holiday until Covid-19 is well under control.
Postscript: Having spent a considerable amount of time in the swimming pool attached to our room, I now have a good idea on why public swimming pools haven’t yet been opened up post covid-19. Basically, I found myself blowing my nose and spitting into the pool a fair bit during the time when I was there. Since the only others using it at that time were my immediate family, it didn’t matter, but this tells you why public swimming pools may not be particularly safe.
Postscript 2: One other problem we have with Indian resorts is the late dinner. At home, we adults eat at 6pm (and our daughter before that). Pretty much every resort we’ve stayed in over the last year and half has started serving dinner only by 8, or sometimes at 9pm. And this has sort of messed with our “systems”.