The Golf View hotel, in the small sanatorium town of Panchmarhi is destination for a pleasant stay albeit anomalies. Pagoda style cottages with large 6-8 steps lead you to large, comfortable tastefully decorated rooms with ill-fitting doors and bolts, falling apart at a push. A rough, undulating, and uneven meadow is characterized by a natural, unmanicured landscape featuring hummocks, dips and grassy lumps. The attempt to please at every corner does not reflect in the kitchen’s underdone parathas and curries lacking aroma owing to penny pinching the cheapest oil and rationing of spices and herbs. The pathways have been set by a novice mason, with every tile going its own way.
Exceptional service. This hotel has every employee at every level fully empowered to provide excellent service to the guest. Even the smallest link in the chain for customer satisfaction smiles and responds like a professional. This makes the stay very pleasant. We were there for three nights and four days. We liked certain parts of the hotel very much.
The hotel is located just after the military cantonment and the local town market, if one is driving down from Pipariya, which is the closest railway station. Panchmarhi is a smaller town than Pipariya and it does not have any emergency facilities for either locals or a guest. Therefore, one must be armed with knowledge and information at Pipariya in case of any urgency.
The Golf View hotel is so-named because of an army expanse close to the hotel to play golf. However, the large opening is hardly fit to host even national level golf tournaments let alone international ones.
The Golf View hotel has a decent open parking space near the small reception, which used to be the only structure in the real estate property before it became a hotel. Just next to the parking space, the owner is building a banquet facility, for future use. One can expect, the hotel to become a popular destination wedding venue for couples in Bhopal. This hotel has all the components of a successful wedding site.
The hotel is completely vegetarian, which could have become a very exciting experience with hot and spicy unbroken lentils (kaali daal) in the clear winter air alongwith delicious parathas and kadak rotis. We were also expecting a bevy of cauliflower dishes and other North Indian winter vegetables. Guess what? Cauliflower and broccoli made their appearance only once in a stir-fried vegetable quarter-filled cloche, during our three and a half day stay. The attempt to please the guest by every member of the staff somehow stops at the kitchen output. The food lacks aroma and taste. To the discerning tongue, it is clearly the use of the cheapest oil with the least time spent on the cooking flame to save some more money. Herbs and spices are clearly rationed. The parathas are uncooked unless I told the chef at the open counter to re-fry them twice with butter. The result was a much better Indian bread with the sharpest of kicks. It could have easily come from the chef himself instead of me, the guest asking for it twice by sending it back. How does a raw paratha and a raw kulcha add to the fun of a holiday? It doesn’t. A hotel positioning itself as a prime destination charging five star rates without a pool should know this.
The rooms are built on the lines of beautiful Marwadi style cottages. This is extremely pleasing to the eye. However, the bolts, which are inconsistent in design, keep falling apart. The doors do not fit and are made out of the cheapest kail wood or faux wood. Again, not a welcome site in hotel charging five star tariffs. The meadow is large and very comfortable for sun bathing. The surface is made out of sod, turf rolls, or grass carpets grown in specialized farms, harvested with a thin layer of soil and roots intact, and rolled up for transport and immediate installation. The result is a variegated surface not in line with a global level garden maintenance.
Come to think of it. The owner of this hotel must have spent a pretty packet while converting it as a property ready to receive guests both from Delhi and Bhopal, not to speak of global travellers. However, all he had to do was bring in a earth mover / bull dozer and even out the plot before he dug for foundations to the cottages. This would have reduced the pathway to a evenly surfaced pathway instead of a hilly trail – nothing wrong with it but the civil engineer who built this hotel must be a small time mason and not an engineer with experience in global level hospitality.
The Golf View hotel is a good hotel. It somehow stops at being a great one. The hotel has clearly been built as per the owner’s personal tastes and not according to the global standards for hospitality. Every business has some rules. The hospitality construction business has its own rules. One can’t just build as per personal whims. One has to follow the rules of the dhanda.
Most guests were small and medium-scale business families from Bhopal or other cities. Most of them asked for cold drinks at night at the peak of winter. It was clear the Sprite and the Fanta would be mixed with cheap whiskey or rum inside the pagoda style rooms. Well, clearly the guests were having a good time. This speaks well for a hotel but it would be less pretentious for the hotel if they did it more openly with a bar where the guests celebrated alcohol instead of hiding it in the privacy of their rooms and apologizing for it in their actions. If you are a hotel, act like one. Don’t pretend to be a temple.
The hotel neither has a pool nor does it have a restaurant with air-conditioning. The open air dining area is nice and cozy with an uneven floor. In fact, the terra cotta decorations hanging from the trees inside the dining area are very beautiful. The burning logs beside the tables makes eating out very comfortable and exciting. However, if this had been a choice and not the only option, it would have been more welcome. Monkeys are present around the dining area but they are not a menace as there are enough staff to shoo them away.
A closed restaurant with glass walls would have been better acting as a greenhouse in the winter, warming the cockles of the guests’ hearts. Other than saving money for a structure, one fails to understand the charm of installing a open air dining area with no other choice for Golf View hotel. One has to give the staff credit for accommodating every wish from the guest including carrying buffet food to the room. Every morsel requested is carried dutifully by the kitchen stewards to the guest’s room.
The pathway from the last room to the reception has a gradient of at least five feet. That is massive. It’s not an irritant but if the management wishes to place this hotel among the best in the upper crust of database of hotel in India, then this is not going to cut it. Similarly, if the doors had been installed without the occasional rumble and squeak of bent wood or faux wood then it would have been closer to that standard in hospitality. Currently, it isn’t. Opening and shutting the main door and the bathroom door had bolts falling off and quite the struggle to fit the door in place. Totally, undesirable.
Every room has a part of the doorframe sticking out from the floor – a rise of at least three inches. I didn’t but that feature has the possibility of any guest to stub their toe on it. Unnecessary. The bathroom has a wedge on the floor. Another possibility of an accident on a wet floor. Very cute Marwari architectural settings but again, not desirable.
