My bad hotel experience

Christmas is here, and in Swaziland, a tourism driven country, hotels have started aggressively advertising their services. Staying in a good hotel is a pleasurable experience. Not having to clean after myself and plan family meals suits me just fine. On the other hand, staying in a bad hotel really sucks. I had a bad experience at The George Hotel in Manzini.

When we relocated, there were a number of logistical problems that resulted in us having to camp there for a few days. The hotel touts itself as “home away from home”.  My foot! I don’t know about other people, but it certainly didn’t feel like home for me. Moments after checking into Room 104, my son went to use the bathroom and there was a loud droning sound emanating from there. When I went to check, I discovered the toilet floor was flooded too.  In panic, I called reception and a lethargic receptionist came and looked annoyed for being summoned for such a small problem. “It must be the lights, I think you switched them on that’s why you’re getting that sound.” That was it. So weren’t we supposed to switch them on? We’ve switched lights in a lot of places but never got that sound. To sort out the mess on the floor, an angry cleaner just waltzed in and walked straight to the bathroom without acknowledging anyone. It didn’t stop there, when we wanted to put our valuables in the safes, we discovered they didn’t work, and staff members were as surprised as we were that there was such a problem.  After an exhausting trip from Joburg and a bad start to our stay, we retired for the night and hoped life would look brighter the next day. Joy comes in the morning, right? Wrong!

When we reported for breakfast in the morning, some guy in hotel uniform waited until we had filled our plates with food before announcing, in a voice loud enough to wake the dead, that our room was registered under one person so the rest of the team wasn’t supposed to eat.  When my husband corrected him, he went to check his records, and with a grandfatherly smile, he said, “Yeah, you can all eat,” as if he was donating the food to us. He did not even apologise for having shouted the wrong thing in the beginning  or at least admit he had made a mistake.

The George Hotel

I don’t know if it’s because I was now in a very foul mood because of all the wrong things that were happening, but the breakfast plates were very small! Don’t they say breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dine like a pauper? And the heat from the ban maries was so intense it  appeared targeted  at burning hands that lingered too long in them. There appeared to be a concerted effort to ensure people didn’t eat too much.Waiters littered the whole place and kind of reminded me of our prefects in my boarding school dining hall. Sometimes they outnumbered the guests, and looked like they would arrest anyone who overate, the way they just hovered without really saying or doing much, just watching, like weight watchers. 

A few of the waiters were quite sweet, though, I realised after a day or two. They offered to hold my baby while I dished up for the bigger brother and myself. One of them unfortunately didn’t have an eye for beauty and cheerily said, “Hello, Boy Boy!!” to my pretty little girl.

When we got back to our room, a new monotonous humming sound had started, and no, it wasn’t the lights. The noise reminded me of my days as a little girl at my rural home in Dowa, where there was a grinding mill. I called reception again to complain about the noise. He said it was coming from the turbines turning the laundry machines. Again, no apologies.  My son, who has autism and is sensitive to loud noises, spent his time with his fingers plugged in his ears. That, naturally, upset me and I requested to be moved from that room. Even though, the hotel staff I came in contact with were mostly sour, they had quite a sense of humour, I’ll give that to them. After two days we were moved – to a room adjacent to the pool bar where revelers drank and cackled like a pack of hyenas till late into the night. As they got more and more inebriated, they began to sound as loud as the turbines we had run away from initially.

The trainee who came to help us move to the new room is the only person who ever apologised for the noise.  Everyone else appeared annoyed that I was annoyed by the noise. I found the courtesy of the staff at The George Hotel quite wanting. I asked my husband where he would place this hotel on a scale of 1-10. “Zero,” he said without batting an eyelid. I’m not de-campaigning the hotel, just giving an honest assessment of my experience with them.