A new kind of hotel

From travels in small town India I have had enough experience of hotels in the Rs 2000/- and below range. With a few exceptions the experience has been uniformly uninspiring. 

Things that make the travel experience less than fun include:

• the hotels are grimy and dirty 

• rooms have cheap plastic furniture that ages very fast and looks shabby 

• cobwebs

• walls always have stains, discolourations or yikes, cracks 

• power cuts 

• kitschy out-of-place decor if at all. A hotel I went to recently had a life-sized wooden sculpture of the famous Marilyn Monroe image.  

• yucky toilets - of course the thing that most spoils a hotel experience. Smelly, leaky taps, non-functional plumbing,   

• highly dubious bed linen and blankets 

• Restaurants if-present , have the deadening standard pan-india menu , you find in countless hotels countrywide. I call it the ‘panneer butter masala’ menu 

There is a deep and pervasive lack of interest in maintenance (and it runs much deeper in India than just hotels). I wonder why this is. Is it so expensive to keep a room clean and have everything work the way it should be ? 

The other ‘design pattern’ is the choice of building and furnishing material that ages rapidly or starts looking bad quickly and easily. Flooring material, Nilkamal chairs, wall paint 

I therefore propose a new kind of hotel. The design philosophy is: 

austere, spartan, impeccable, fanatic about cleanliness, local culture and aesthetics 

Have less stuff or less facilities, but keep whatever you have looking good and maintain it 

Have a breakthrough in bathroom quality. 

Figure out how to keep the walls clean - maybe use whitewash which is cheaper and repaint more frequently  

Start working with a whole new set of materials that do the job  without degrading in appearance and quality rapidly over time  

Figure out a new menu tapping into local expertise and local traditions 

I read the logic of Tata’s Ginger chain of hotels somewhere and they seem to be on these lines. And pilgrim spots like Tirumala tend to work on these lines of austere and functional. We can build on these and other experiences