Hotel Majestic, Kolkata

OK in a strange sort of way

by henchard on Feb 20, 2008

2 / 5

Well this is a strange one. My wife and I visited West Bengal and Kolkata in February 2008. Hotels in the city centre are quite expensive so budget (ish) travellers ... more have the option of the backpacker enclave in Sudder Street or trying to find a basic Indian hotel. On the grounds that we wanted to try the later we booked into the Majestic which is a on older/character hotel.

The first problem was our 3.00 a.m. arrival and being warned that they might not be good at handling that I faxed the day before to double confirm. The taxi driver eventually found the hotel and we had to rattle the locked gates for the night porter to wake up. But to be fair we were expected and were shown to a dingy but clean Indian Hotel Room for some sleep. Registration was dealt with next morning.

The hotel is well placed in the centre of Kolkata but is the very definite "down at heel" Indian local hotel experience. The room on the second floor would probably not be to inexperienced western travellers liking, but by Indian standards was fine and importantly clean. Unfortunately we didn't know that the bar was the preserve of very loud music with girl singers being paid to sing (and more?) by the male clientele. Quite it is not, but the bar experience was interesting to watch (once) but made sleep on the second floor difficult. When we returned after a trip to the country we asked for a room on the 4th floor. These were much better rooms but suffered from quite a bit of traffic noise. There is a very ancient lift and if you choose to walk to the 4th floor you will invariably have to step over someone sleeping on the stairs!

We paid about 1600 rupees a night.

So a genuine Indian hotel, clean (ish), noisy at times, quirky in an Indian way, might not suit inexperienced western travellers but actually ok in a strange sort of way.

One tip if you do stay here but want a decent Western breakfast the upmarket Peerless Inn hotel is about 5 minutes walk away (towards the Oberoi) and they do an excellent full buffet western breakfast (open to non residents) for the equivalent of about 5GBP. Their ground floor coffee and cake shop is also great for getting away from India and a bit of Western luxury.

Hope this helps. less