Fraudulent hotel

Fraudulent hotel

I made reservations for my family several months ago at the Safari Garden Hotel in Puncak. I requested a suite with two rooms, one for my husband and myself and another for our daughter and her friend. Sri (Jakarta 769-1071) and Sri (Puncak 253000) confirmed the availability of Singa 2 at Rp 80,000 per night (as listed in the current rate sheet).

Safari Garden Hotel's brochure states that all rooms have hot water and, by virtue that they state televisions are in all rooms, one might expect that all rooms have electricity. This is not the case. We checked in on Monday, Dec. 19, 1994 to find most lamps not working and no water at all on one floor. Toilet sheets were missing, and generally the rooms were substandard. We were shown numerous other rooms including Duyung(s) where floors were flooded, lamps did not work and animal feces were on the beds. The staff brushed the feces onto the floor and declared the sheets clean.

We proceeded to Zebra(s) where the first room we looked at had no electricity at all. We stayed in the second because it was now past midnight and the two small children were quite tired. None of the rooms we inspected vaguely resembled the nicely furnished rooms in the brochure. The front desk manager agreed that the rate for our Zebra room (listed at Rp 110,000 in the current rate sheet) would be provided to us at the same rate quoted for our original room.

The room boy gave us breakfast "chit's" and warned us that breakfast was only served from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. The next morning we arrived for our "included breakfast buffet" at 8.15 a.m. -- and lo, habis! Breakfast was over. We ordered nasi goreng from the menu (which is what we were told was on the buffet) but the chits were no good when ordering from the menu even though they removed the buffet early.

My husband went to the front desk to check out. The Zebra room promised at RP 80,000, due to the staff's errors and the poor condition of a dozen rooms, was now Rp 160,000 for our family. That was double the promised rate and 50 percent higher than their published rate.

No amount of reasoning did any good and the front desk staff would not return my husband's passport until he paid the outrageously fraudulent higher rate. And yes, we were required to pay for our "included" breakfast in addition to the theft at the front desk. When I requested the address of the owner of the hotel, several employees refused to provide it. This renders it impossible to inform him of the problems at the hotel in any other way than an open letter to The Jakarta Post.

RUTH E. DAVIS

Jakarta