resorts

The first time I stayed in a resort was during my honeymoon in 2010, when we stayed at the Vivanta in Bentota (Sri Lanka). The travel agent (yes, we still paid them good margins on those days) had convinced us to stay two nights there. Friends had told it is “romantic”. Our room got upgraded to a suite.

And then we got bored. Our boredom occurred on several fronts. Firstly, there was nothing much to do there. Both of us being good south indian middle class kids, our idea of a “holiday” had then been the package tour with a tightly packed schedule. Suddenly, two days at a single hotel was incredibly boring.

Then, we got bored of the food. Back then I was vegetarian, which meant we could realistically only go to one of the three or four restaurants in the resort. By the time we finished a day there, we were completely bored of the food.

Then there was nothing much to do. The swimming pool was crowded, having been monopolised by a large and noisy tour group. The beach was okay, nothing compared to that at Trincomalee on Sri Lanka’s east coast (which we visited in 2014; oh, and by the way, my wife has started a new newsletter with her travel experiences. The first episode is called “paid sex in Sri Lanka”).

Over the years, we have kept going back to resorts, and seldom enjoyed them.

I mean, spending one night at a resort, like we did during our recent travel to Tamil Nadu, is good. You are in the vicinity for something else, and it gives you a nice place to relax and recharge, and before you get bored of the place, you are out of there.

Any longer than that at a resort, unless there is something compelling to do, is a disaster. You get bored. The food starts becoming monotonous. You start doing things just to fill your day – and that thing is usually NOT reading the book you took on vacation. You might drink excessively. And so on.

Then there is the size of the resort. If it is too small, it can easily get monopolised by one large (ish) group, making it unpleasant for everyone else there (this has happened countless times now). If it is too large, it can get a bit impersonal (though one time we stayed at a really large resort, in Maldives, we loved it).

The other issue with resorts is that you are forced to follow their schedules. As a family, for example, we have our dinners around 6pm, which is normal for some parts of the world but rather early for India. Most resorts force us to wait till 8pm (or even 9pm) for our dinner, thus upsetting our schedules and sleep.

Another annoying thing I find about resorts is their desire to “add value”. From a resort’s point of view, they want guests to stay for longer, and that means offering them more things to do (unless there is something “natural to do”, such as a good beach, near the resort). And so the resorts pack themselves with all kinds of “activities”.

On Saturday, for example, at a resort near Kumbakonam, they had arranged for a classical dance performance. The number of times they reminded us about that was not funny. And some of the other “things to do” sounded like things you would write in a Social Studies exam to make your answer longer – “feed the fish in this pond”, “light a lamp, make a wish and float it in that pond”, and so on.

All this said, I was happy to be in that resort for that night (apart from the late dinner, which affected my sleep). Some people are of the opinion that on some kinds of holidays, the quality of the hotel doesn’t matter since “you only need a place to sleep”. As far as I’m concerned, though, I don’t mind paying the premium for a nice place so that the sleep is (sort of) guaranteed, and we are able to properly relax.

I thought I was done with this post, and then realised I’ve written about resorts once before.

Resorts

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”.

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!