Umaid Bhawan - Review from Thomas D.

I booked 5 rooms for my family and myself for Dec. 24-27, 2006 in the Umaid Bhawan. It was not easy to find something in Jaipur during that time because of several conferences, so I was glad to find rooms in a hotel with excellent reviews at a reasonable price. I booked through hotel.com and received an e-mail confirmation from the Umaid. When we arrived after a long drive on Xmas Eve, we were told to wait for the reservations manager, who apologized and told us something about a plumbing problem which made several rooms in the "palace" unuseable. He had therefore made arrangements to accomodate us in their "newly renovated castle". When my wife and I went to check it out, it turned out that "newly renovated" was a euphemism for "construction site" - it smelled of fresh paint, people were working with noisy power tools and there was no infrastructure whatsoever (never mind that the rooms were several floors up without an elevator). Originally we were told that this was supposed to only be for one night, but they were not able to make any guarantees that we would get rooms in the main hotel later. Needless to say, we refused to stay in a construction site. In the meantime members of my family had been told stories about people too sick to check out by other members of the hotel staff. That, together with their inability to promise rooms for the next day, indicated that all their excuses were blatant lies to veil the fact that they had overbooked out of greed. This is especially scandalous, given that I had prepaid(!) the entire bill months in advance and had received an e-mail confirmation. In the end they refunded the money through hotels.com, but instead of celebrating Xmas in peace, we had to go through an Odyssey of finding rooms in other hotels and ended up leaving a day early. Thanks to the reservations staff of the Umaid Bhawan our stay in Jaipur will be remembered with a rotten aftertaste.