FAO: Mr. Kuhan Panchadcharam
Assistant Front office Manager
HOTEL IMPERIAL – LUXURY COLLECTION
Jalan Sultan Ismail
50250 Kuala Lumpur
Malaysia

I am writing to reconfirm our experience at your heavily reputed 5 Star Luxury Collection of hotels. We had already discussed this with Patricia and you in our meeting in our room. As you are aware, I was on an 18 days Far East vacation with my wife and 2 daughters

The following points are a brief description of our experience at your hotel.

1 – When we checked in we were told that the rooms that we had agreed with the travel agent in UK were not available, i.e. connecting rooms which were facing the twin towers. Neither of these facilities were available. We were given a room in the back wing of the hotel with no connections to my daughter’s room & had to accept as we were left with no other option.

2 - An amount of RM800 was taken from my credit card as a deposit with no proper explanation. I am a frequent traveler and always stay in 5 star hotels and never have I paid a deposit. All hotels just take my credit card details. You explained to me later on why the deposit had been taken but we are still not convinced that this is the correct way. During this Far East trip we stayed at four other 5 star hotels and they only took my credit card details. Anyhow, it is your business and you know it better, so again had no option but to agree to that.

3 - My daughters wanted to go for a swim and they called room service for the timings and they were passed between 3 different people in different departments and no one had any idea about the timings. Eventually my daughters had to physically walk to the pool to check it out for themselves.

4 - We reached the hotel on the first night after a short tour of KL around 10.30pm and went to the Italian restaurant in your hotel and were informed we could not have dinner, neither in the restaurant nor in the room, as their last order is taken at 10.30pm. There were no efforts from the staff members to make any provisions for us. Due to our dietary needs we could also not eat in your Essence restaurant on the 1st floor as we are strict vegetarians. Being strangers in the city we had to struggle and finally received delivered pizza at 12 midnight from another restaurant, which we had to find ourselves. Even the Pizza boy was not allowed to come to our room but we were asked to collect it from the entrance around 12.30am.

5 - The next morning (13th August), when we woke up in our room number 3615, we found ants all over the bathroom floor. Initially at 9am we telephoned room service and had no immediate response. At 9.30am we telephoned again which had no affect either. I could not believe I was in a 5 star hotel with ants all over the bathroom and no one was seriously concerned. We repeatedly called 4 – 5 times and eventually I walked out of my room and found a member of staff in the corridor around 11am. I took him into my room and showed him the ants. Cutting the long story short, in the next hour I had 15 – 20 different calls from different departments asking me to do various things. Eventually, I had to ask for the manager, as it had been 3 hours since the issue arose. I was shocked to see that when a European lady came with the ant-killer, there were more ants than I had initially seen. Finally, at 1pm our room was shifted to 3614, after what felt like a long day’s battle. After that we had around half an hour’s meeting with your colleague and you.

6 - At 12 noon my daughters gave a person from room service some left over pizza’s to heat up for lunch as it was not possible to go out due to problems. After 15 minutes another gentlemen came back with our food not heated up, asking if we were ready to pay to heat up the food. We could not believe this, but we agreed and received it after 20 – 30 minutes.

To cut a very long story short a trip to KL was spent in struggling in a 5 star hotel with all of us having a low morale of doing anything else.

The KL trip cost the family in travelling, hotel bills and our time off from work around £5K and if this was spent killing ants and explaining the management regarding the faults in their hotel and how to improve it I think it does not make sense since it was all done at our cost.

This has been the worst hotel experience in my life. We missed all our morning activities and could not experience some of the attractions we were looking forward to such as the Kuala Lumpur tower and Twin Towers. As you must be aware, it is very frustrating to come all the way from U.K., spending this kind of money and not being able to enjoy our stay as planned.

We were told that in compensation, the manager was willing to give a free dinner, which sounded like a joke, to waste somebody’s trip and spoil their mood considering they only had one day in Kuala Lumpur.

We will never forget this experience.

Looking forward to hearing from you.


Kishor Negandhi