Oberoi Amarvillas

I am very much of two minds on my assessment of this property. In some ways it succeeds admirably, and in some ways it is a total miss.

Clearly the great strength is the view of the Taj Mahal from every room. And that is maybe part of the problem: the hotel relies on this one key thing too much. The views are lovely, but the rooms are perhaps a little small. The bathrooms in each of our two rooms (more on that in a bit) were not great; they lacked counter space, and in one the door to the shower couldn’t open at the same time as the door to the bathroom. And turning on the shower had the unfortunately tendency to spray water all over the bathroom floor. There were also subtle differences (different toilets, for example) that made me think they had tried but not really achieved exacting standards during construction. There are also minor examples of wear and tear that I couldn’t help but feeling could be easily remedied if management really wanted to deal with them.

The other incredibly frustrating thing is that there is no view of the Taj from either of the two restaurants or from the pool. I couldn’t help but feel that a better architect would have found a solution for this.

The quality of the food in both the Western and Indian themed dining rooms was good to very good—Indian dishes clearly being of a higher quality than their Western counterparts. Service was also strong, but not as personal as an Aman.

Finally, I can’t help but mention the incident that lead to us having two rooms. Our first room flooded. At 4 in the morning. During scheduled repairs to the fire control system. Hmmm. And you know it is a crisis in India when you find an Indian woman running around in her pajamas trying to deal with the problem. The most frustrating thing is that there were about half a dozen opportunities for the hotel to prevent the noise or the flooding being an issue—most obviously, the hotel was only at 20% occupancy, so just proactively moving us from the wing and floors in which the repairs were being conducted would have been the right thing to do. Nevertheless, the hotel management was clearly deeply apologetic and did resolve the situation to our satisfaction. The manager was extremely solicitous, and clearly wanted to make sure we kept Oberoi properties in mind for future trips and I did appreciate their efforts. So, in the spirit of stuff happens, and it is how you fix problems that is probably more important that trying to pretend that you never have a problem in the first place, I have to say I was absolutely impressed.

I still left frustrated by feeling that the property could have been so much better. Although the result was really good, it is still irritating the way any missed opportunity at greatness is, if that makes sense.